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MODERN 
GERMAN LITERATURE. 




BENJAMIN W. WELLS, Ph.D. 




ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
1895. 



Copyright, 1895, 
By Benjamin W. Wells. 

All rights reserved. 



©fotbetsttg Press: 

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



PREFACE. 



The botanist, as he wanders through our woods, is 
attracted alike by the fungus and the flower, and 
the seed-vessel is more to him than the blossom. So, 
with studious eyes intent, the philologists search 
through the German poets' grove, " Der Deutsche 
Dichterwald," and grub the specimens for their her- 
baria. Even the cryptogamous forms of literature, 
the glosses and the interlinear versions, have here 
their charm and place, while the triumphs of culture 
may be to them less valuable materials than the 
growths of untutored nature. So, too, there is a point 
of view from which it is as interesting, perhaps more 
interesting, to dissect a savage than a philanthropist, 
the Ormulum than the Adonais. There is a sense in 
which Shakspere and Goethe are products, as much 
as M. Tai ne's virtue and vice, sugar and vitriol, as 
much as the religious weekly or the American maga- 
zine. A scientific analysis or synthesis is profitable 
and useful in literature ; but when it is exhaustive 
it is apt to be exhausting, and when it affects to 



vi 



PKEFACE. 



despise the study of literature for aesthetic enjoyment 
it becomes injurious to the development of popular 
culture. Surely it is right and helpful to pluck the 
flowers of literature without grubbing for their roots. 
Tor while no doubt the study of these roots and of the 
soil from which they draw their nourishment may 
lead a chosen few to a deeper knowledge than others 
will attain, experience tells us that the majority of 
those who have set out, like Hylas, to find the stream 
that runs by philology's shrine have tripped over so 
many of these roots that they have had no time to 
waste " with the flowers on the margin," while their 
" light urns " have been left quite as empty as his. 

This book, then, is not for the learned specialist, 
nor for him who aspires to become one, but rather 
for those to whom, as to the great majority of our 
college students, German literature is a pleasant avo- 
cation, a secondary means of culture. 

What does such a well-educated foreigner care to 
know about German literature ? That is what most 
of our university men have to ask themselves, and 
this book is an attempt at an answer whose correct- 
ness others must determine. Evidently most cul- 
tured foreigners will never be German ists. They 
will want to know, not about the "Muspilli" or 
the "Wessobrunn Prayer," but, first of all, about 
what men are writing and reading now, and then 
about what they continue to read of the works of 
older generations. 



PREFACE. 



vii 



Now, except perhaps the Nibelungenlied, there is 
little if anything printed before Lessing's " Literary 
Letters" (1759) that educated Germans read for 
literary enjoyment to-day, and there is very little be- 
fore that time of which a cultured foreigner, not a 
specialist, needs or cares to know. And yet in the 
current literary histories rather more than half the 
space is usually given to the earlier periods, and in 
great part to men who live chiefly in the memory of 
those whose profession it is to explore musty cata- 
combs and fill antiquarian journals. 

There are, indeed, aspects of this earlier literature 
that fall naturally within the scope of a more general 
culture. The interdependence of literature and poli- 
tics in Germany is very curious and suggestive. 
Luther is still a name to conjure with, and Wagner 
has reawakened a wide interest in the Mbelungen 
saga and in Parzival and Tristan. Still, even here I 
have labored to be brief in my introductory chapter, 
and have preferred to be incomplete rather than 
obscure. 

Then I have tried to show how Klopstock, Wie- 
lancl, and Herder herald the new era, while the great 
reformer, Lessing, prepares the way for the universal 
literature of Goethe and Schiller, the German classic 
authors of whom we read and hear most to-day, 
and shall for some time to come. Nearly half the 
volume is given to these, and, as is fitting, more to 
Goethe than to Schiller. If Richter and the Roman- 



viii 



PREFACE. 



tic School then claim a chapter, it is less because 
these men, now lapped in their own lead, have an 
intrinsic interest, than because unless we know what 
they were it is hard to understand what Heine be- 
came. And Heine has peculiar claims on our intel- 
ligent study, because this last great German poet 
was the first who was in touch with the distinctive 
moving forces of our modern life. It is only when 
we come to see the relations of our thought to his 
that we can comprehend how he is separated from 
Goethe more widely than Goethe from us. Finally, 
I have devoted a chapter to modern novels and 
dramas because these are almost the only forms of 
contemporary imaginative literature that continue to 
be generally read, whether at home or abroad, and I 
have not wished to dwell on any writer who to a 
cultured foreigner would probably be only a shadowy 
name. 

In a book whose sole purpose is to further literary 
appreciation and enjoyment, a learned and critical 
apparatus would be superfluous and impertinent. I 
have spoken of no book that I do not know at first 
hand, but my judgment has often been influenced, 
sometimes directed, by the great German critics, es- 
pecially by my " Collegienhefte " of Professor Scherer's 
lectures in Berlin, between 1877 and 1880, and by 
his admirable " Litteraturgeschichte." I have con- 
sulted also Gervinus and Schmidt, seldom without 
profit, and the standard biographies, as will be seen 



PREFACE. 



ix 



from occasional foot-notes. I have quoted and para- 
phrased from them and from others wherever it 
seemed desirable ; for my modest ambition has been 
less to be original than to be helpfully suggestive to 
the lovers of pure literature. 



May 20, 1895. 



BENJAMIN W. WELLS. 



i 

i 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

I. The Origins 1 

II. The First Fruits: Klopstock, Wieland, 

Herder 38 

III. Lessing the Reformer 73 

IV. The Young Goethe Ill 

V. Goethe's Manhood and Old Age . . . 143 

VI. Goethe's "Faust" 181 

VII. Schiller's Early Years 219 

VIII. Schiller on the Height 256 

IX. RlCHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . . 290 

X. Heinrich Heine 324 

XI. Imaginative Literature since 1850 . . 365 



Index to Authors and Works .... 401 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE ORIGINS. 

Every literature has its periods of flourishing and of 
decay. Like the political life of a nation, and often 
in connection with it, the literary life ebbs and 
flows, rises and falls. And in none of the great liter- 
atures of Europe is this so clearly marked as in the 
German. At the beginning of the seventh century, 
as the Teutonic tribes, upborne by the triumphs of 
the great migration, looked down on conquered Rome 
and rested for a time on their laurels, the forces that 
had been engaged in that struggle of arms turned to the 
literary glorification of its experiences. A distinc- 
tively national epic literature appeared in Germany, 
almost at the same time that similar conditions were 
uniting to form the early Anglo-Saxon epic in Eng- 
land. The year six hundred, then, may mark the 
first blossoming of German literature. 

But in the spiritual struggle that followed the 
political conquest, the Teutonic races were less for- 
tunate. They could conquer the Roman legions, 

l 



2 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



they yielded to the Eoraan church ; and their intel- 
lectual forces were diverted to its service in ever 
increasing measure. The old national poetry was 
forgotten, perhaps even despised, by the monks of 
the cloister, and the wandering singer w T as no longer 
" high,, placed in hall, a welcome guest," as he had 
been before monasteries and monastic records gave a 
title to posthumous fame that promised to be more 
enduring than the memorial of his songs. 

So the literature that had been national in the 
seventh century was from the beginning of the tenth 
thoroughly catholic, general. The epic lives of 
Christ, the Saxon "Heliand," or the High-German 
" Krist " of Otfrid, are sometimes spirited and poetic, 
but they are not distinctively German. Indeed it 
was not until, beneath the energetic sceptre of the 
Ottos, the Germans began to feel once more the 
dignity of their national individuality thaj they 
reached back again instinctively to their own earlier 
traditions, to their peculiar independent sources 
of inspiration. Then, six hundred years after the 
first outburst of national song, the popular epic 
wells up again in the splendid beauty of "Gudrun" 
and the " Nibelungenlied." This is the century 
of the " Volks-epos ; " the whole nation is aglow 
with high political aspirations, full of overflowing 
strength. 

But for the second time we see these lofty hopes 
deceived. For as the Roman church had moulded 
to its ends the spiritual forces that made the first 
national epic possible, so now the Roman law, trans- 



THE OBIGINS. 



3 



formed and petrified into the feudal system, was 
to blight the intellectual fruitage of the German 
nation. The upper classes, the nobles, under its in- 
fluence, separated themselves more and more from 
their followers and from the peasants, and, while the 
latter became coarser and more material, the former 
grew more refined, but less broadly human. Litera- 
ture remained with the nobles, it tended to become 
their peculiar possession, but it was in a new form. 
The court epic and its subjects no longer had their 
roots in the national glories of a legendary past ; they 
were rather the graceful figments of a foreign fancy. 
Now it will be the court of Arthur of which they 
sing, some Welsh fable, or a legend from Geoffrey of 
Monmouth's "little book," or perhaps it will be the 
mystic story of the Grail with its Celtic ideals' of 
spiritual knighthood, or it may be the siege of Troy 
and the campaigns of Alexander that claim their 
attention. And if by chance the subject should be 
their own German emperor, Charlemagne, they will 
treat him in the same spirit that they did the 
Macedonian, and send him travelling to Constanti- 
nople on a fool's errand. 

More beautiful in form, more philosophical in con- 
ception, this courtly epic had no root in the popular 
consciousness, and therefore in the next century it 
died gradually away of over-refinement and exhaus- 
tion, so that the year 1500 found literature at an ebb 
perhaps even lower than the tenth century could 
show. Naturally this manifested itself most clearly 
in poetry. That highest form of imaginative litera- 



4 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



ture now " ceases to belong to the order of the day, 
it is of no general interest to the people; it has 
become a means of agitation, a tool of political 
schemers, or a purveyor of coarsest entertainment. 
It is indeed not without productive power in matter 
of invention. It uses up a vast amount of material, 
and creates a few moral types, mostly results of hate 
or jest, and often of a grandiose conception. But it 
lacks the charm of form, it is too ephemeral, too indif- 
ferent to external beauty. ... It transfers to a more 
fortunate generation the best that it has, as mere 
formless material." 1 

Here, again, literary decay coincides with, and 
seems to depend on, the decay of national power. 
The Reformation cost Germany her political pre- 
eminence for well-nigh three centuries and a half. 
The conditions that produced and succeeded it could 
not but be fatal to the development of literary art. 
But the tide rose again when the German heart was 
enlarged by the glorious struggles and victories of 
Frederic II. German literature responded to the 
national spirit and celebrated its third and greatest 
triumph in the age of Goethe, while to-day the tide 
seems to have ebbed again as quickly as it rose. 

Few phenomena in the literary history of the world 
are so remarkable as the outburst of that splendid 

1 Scherer, " Litteraturgeschichte." To this book and to " Col- 
legienhefte" of Scherer's Berlin lectures in the years 1877-1880 
this chapter is indebted, directly or indirectly, on almost every page. 
While independence of critical judgment has been sought in every 
case, the author is probably more indebted to his first and chief 
instructor in this field than even he himself is aware. 



THE ORIGTNS. 



5 



galaxy of literary genius, after the wars of the great 
Frederic had given breath once more to the stifled 
giant of German nationality. It was as if the pent- 
up energies of three centuries of repression had 
broken loose to flood the world with light. The 
peculiarity of these conditions invites a treatment of 
German literature to which the French or our own 
would ill submit. The English has a consistent, 
steady development from Chaucer to Tennyson, seldom 
without a poet of the first rank, or without masters 
of prose. The French, too, has had a succession of 
reputable names that link in unbroken chain the 
days of Villehardouin in the thirteenth century to 
the masters of our own. It is true we speak of a 
classical period both in French and in English litera- 
ture, but there is no such contrast between the age 
of Louis XIV., or of Elizabeth, and the times that 
went before or followed, as there is in Germany be- 
tween the age of Goethe and the five centuries that 
preceded it. In no great literature save the German 
do we see such abandonment of past achievements 
and such laborious regaining of former conquests. 
For this reason it is possible to appreciate and under- 
stand German literature since the days of Frederic II., 
independently of what went before, to a degree that 
would be impossible in French literature were one to 
begin his study with Voltaire, or in English should 
one begin with Fielding. Hence it is not without 
justification in the nature of the case that those to 
whom the study of German is an avocation and a 
subsidiary means of culture should be content with 



6 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



a brief review of the earlier time, that they may con- 
centrate their critical attention and aesthetic appreci- 
ation upon the century that begins with Lessing and 
ends with Heine. Such a brief review of the origins 
of that culminating century is the purpose of this 
chapter. 

Of the first epic period, its songs of heroes and their 
deeds, and of the mythology of their warrior gods, 
such scanty remnants are preserved that one might 
say it has practically perished past recovery. Yet from 
a fragment of a song of Hildebrand and his single 
combat with Hadubrand, his own son, and still more 
from English and Norse poems of similar character 
and from the later German poetry, it is clear that 
the first blossoming of German literature was of 
great force and rugged beauty. No contemporaneous 
effort was made to commit this poetry to writing. 
That permanence was for the present reserved for 
the service of religion. The first Teutonic book was- 
the translation of the Bible made by Bishop Wulfila 
(Ulfilas) for the West Goths on the Danube. Books 
have their fates, and a very beautiful manuscript of 
this work, which, though now incomplete, is thought 
by some to be contemporary with the good bishop 
himself, is after many vicissitudes preserved to-day in 
the library of the University of Upsala, in the oppo- 
site corner of Europe. 

It was after the first outburst of German song 
that the dispersion of the Teutonic tribes, fostering 
diversity of dialects, led to the segregation of the 
High Germans, whose literary development immedi- 



THE ORIGINS. 



7 



ately concerns us here. But among them in this 
early period literary activity, at least so far as it 
found record in writing, was almost exclusively mo- 
nastic in origin and religious in purpose. Gospel 
harmonies in verse and prose, versions of portions of 
the choir offices, engaged the chief attention of the 
monastic literati, who exercised their imaginations 
on "Visions of Judgment," or more frequently on 
the fanciful legends of their patron saints, and al- 
lowed themselves at rare intervals to be diverted 
by the worldly interests of their cloister to such 
political subjects as the patriotic " Ludwigslied," or 
" Song of King Louis." 

A really intelligent interest in national poetry was, 
however, one of the titles to greatness of the mag- 
nanimous Charles and his cultured counsellor the 
English Alcuin. It is a fair and worthy witness to 
the catholic mind of the noblest mediaeval emperor 
that while he was bending every effort to the con- 
version of the still heathen Saxons, and fostering 
translations into the vernacular of sermons and cate- 
chetical instructions and of the Gospel narrative, he 
was at the same time collecting with zealous care 
the relics of the old heathen poetry. But a narrower 
and more bigoted age suffered this priceless treasure 
of antiquity to perish, though it preserved a vast 
amount of that proselytizing literature for an age to 
which it seems indeed outworn, while the recovery 
of, the epic songs of Charlemagne, like that of the 
lost books of Tacitus and Livy, remains the unfulfilled 
dream of the scholar. 



8 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



From the eighth century until the crusades, the 
German literature that has been preserved to us can 
hardly be regarded as equal in value to that produced 
in England or in France during the same period. 
There was perhaps nothing then written there that 
would be read for its own intrinsic interest and 
literary worth to-day, as we still read the " Chanson 
de Ptoland " or the Anglo-Saxon " Cross." Not until 
the German people felt again the pulses of a reawak- 
ened national life did their literature strike its roots 
once more deep in the popular heart. The immediate 
political cause of this reawakening of national pride 
was the broad policy of Otto and Barbarossa, who re- 
vived in German minds a consciousness of their great 
mission that had slumbered since the death of Char- 
lemagne. But more than this, the far-reaching plans 
of these rulers had brought their subjects into intimate 
contact with the more advanced culture of the South 
and West, and by this the German nobility had be- 
come again as in the days of Theodoric the centre of 
German literary life. Under their refining influence 
grew up the delicately modulated Middle-High- 
German dialect, a language pre-eminently fitted for 
poetic expression. And the instrument that lay so 
temptingly ready to the hand of genius was soon put 
to use in lyrics of love and epic ballads of heroism. 
Soon the standard of the courts reacted on the 
people. Already in the eleventh century there is 
evidence of growing refinement in popular literary 
taste ; for, though the best secular literature was still 
probably in Latin, there were German religious epics 



THE ORIGINS. 



9 



that showed a very considerable development. These 
deal with subjects from the Scriptures, with the. 
crucifixion and death of Christ, with the legends of 
the various Marys, and with the exodus of Israel ; or 
the monastic author will dwell, with reminiscences 
of chivalrous clays, on the adventurous expedition of 
Judith, and, in still freer fancy, will contrast the 
joys of this fleeting life with the horrors of eternal 
death. 

German literature had reached this stage in its de- 
velopment when the crusades came to open new 
avenues to adventure and new horizons to imagina- 
tion. The renewed struggle with the heathen recalled 
the days of Charlemagne and Eoland ; contact with 
the East revived the memories of Alexander's adven- 
tures. The result was immediate. In 1130 the 
French epics of Eoland and of the great Macedonian 
were already done into German. And the native 
poets were quick to catch the new spirit in tales of 
travel and warlike adventure, in the main clearly the 
direct result of the crusades. Such a pseudo-histori- 
cal epic is "'Eother," whom the poet makes a grand- 
father of Charlemagne, though he is in fact a study 
from the Norman Eoger of Sicily. A second and 
perhaps more famous epic tale is " Herzog Ernst," 
who is historically a combination of the rebellious 
Ludolf, son of the Emperor Otto, with Ernst, Duke of 
Bavaria, who was also a rebel. But in the poet's 
hands Ernst has become a crusader and wandering- 
Ulysses, rivalling Sindbad the Sailor in his fabulous 
adventures among pygmies, giants, cyclops, and mag- 



10 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



netic mountains. Another German Ulysses is King 
Orendel, and similar traits can be found in the Ger- 
man version of the legend of an Irish saint, Brendan. 
Even the English martyr, King Oswald, becomes in 
the hands of the Bavarian poet an amorous, half- 
comic crusader. 

This free treatment of the legends of the saints is 
noteworthy, for it implies a less serious view of life 
and its issues. And that was the natural result of 
the crusades, which could not but make the crusaders 
more tolerant. Beligion during this period is coming 
to be looked at less as an alterative than as an ano- 
dyne. One of the crusading poets remarks in a jest 
that hides a truth, which he sees, but perhaps would 
still hesitate to think, at least aloud, that at Acre he 
could not distinguish Jews, Christians, or heathen. 
This is the age when Frederic II. and Saladin con- 
tend for the palm of magnanimity, while the great 
poets of the century, Walther and Wolfram, antici- 
pate Lessing's " Nathan der Weise " in their philo- 
sophic conception and bold teaching of universal 
toleration. Arabians, Jews, and Germans join at the 
Emperor's Sicilian court to open the treasures of 
Aristotle to the Western world. It was indeed a 
wonderful age, a time of broad horizons and distant 
prospects, which were veiled too soon and for centu- 
ries by the cold and selfish policy of the Boman 
curia, that saw in Frederic II. its most dangerous 
enemy, struck from his hand the lamp of culture, 
brought to naught his far-reaching plans, and 
pressed back the swelling tide of the German spirit 



THE ORIGINS. 



11 



till it should break for itself new paths at the 
Reformation. 

This inspiring thirteenth century, that found its 
political incarnation in Frederic, has left its literary 
monuments also. Growing ever more self-conscious, 
more national, through the closing years of the 
twelfth century, German poetry greets us on the 
threshold of the thirteenth with the " Nibelungen- 
liecl," its Iliad, an epic second only to that master- 
piece, and soon to be followed by " Gudrun," a 
veritable German Odyssey. But the first quarter of 
this century is to give us also the philosophical epics 
of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the less thoughtful but 
more popular epic tales of Hartmann von Aue, and 
the exquisite songs of Walther von der Vogelweide, 
surrounded by the melodious chorus of the " Minne- 
sangsfruhling," the " Springtime of the songs of love," 
as this period has been poetically named. The 
whole makes up one of the most remarkable phe- 
nomena of the intellectual life, to be compared to 
"the spacious times of great Elizabeth," and, like 
this, finding its cause and explanation in the political 
life and aspirations of the people, as indeed the last 
great literary epoch of Germany would have been 
impossible but for the inspiration of that greater 
Frederic, king of Prussia and truly king of men. 

The masterpieces of this wonderful generation fall 
almost holly between 1190 and 1220. They may 
be divided broadly into popular and courtly epics, 
while the lyrics take a middle ground. The great 
epic representatives of popular tradition are the 



12 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



" Nibelungenlied " and " Gudrnn." The former tells 
of the love, marriage, and widowed vengeance of 
Kriemhild, a Burgundian princess from the court of 
Worms, whose tragic story associates her with Sig- 
fried, a mythical hero of the race of the Nibelungs 
from the lower Bhine, and after his death with Attila 
and Theodoric of Yerona. But while there is thus an 
historical background, it is plain that chronology is 
thrown to the w:inds, and that heroes dear to the 
popular heart are joined together from various centu- 
ries of German history. Sigfried, who is the chief 
figure in the former half of the epic, has been identi- 
fied by some with that Arminius who defeated Varro 
and the Boman legions of Augustus in the first cen- 
tury ; and Theodoric carries us beyond the age of 
Attila to the sixth century. 

That the legend, or rather the legends, had been 
long fluxed in the popular mind of the Teutonic race 
is clear from the form in which they meet us in Ice- 
land, and from the allusions to them in Anglo-Saxon 
verse. Their main outlines are made familiar, at 
least in part, in our day by the operatic cycle of 
Wagner, though in many particulars the four operas, 
"Kheingold,"" Sigfried," "Die Walkure," and "Die 
Gotterdammerung " follow the Norse rather than the 
distinctively German form of the story. 

The latter half of the " Nibelungenlied " transfers 
the epic scene to the court of Attila, who has become 
the husband of Sigfried's widow. Its grim hero is 
Hagen, the counsellor of the Burgundian kings and 
the slayer of Sigfried, on whom his widow here takes 



THE ORIGINS. 



13 



fearful vengeance. She beguiles her relatives and 
their retainers to a festival at Attila's court, and with 
them Hagen comes, though not beguiled, to their 
common destruction. In fearful struggle all are 
massacred at last, but the best of Attila's retainers 
are also slain, his son is killed, and Kriemhild, too, has 
perished at the hands of the outraged Theodoric. 

The idea that lies at the base of this poem is note- 
worthy and characteristic of the people whence it 
sprang. Heine remarked with some bitterness that 
the strongest characteristic of the German nation in 
his day was their loyalty, their " Treue," and it is 
precisely the conflicting claims of double allegiance 
that form the springs of tragic action in the " Nibe- 
lungenlied " six hundred years before. In Kriemhild's 
case there is the conflict between her duty as wife 
and as sister. In Sigfried's it is between his duty as 
husband and as vassal. Biidiger is divided between 
the claims of his Burgundian guests and those of 
Attila, his over-lord. And so throughout, faith, alle- 
giance, " Treue " is the central thought of nearly every 
phase of the " Nibelungenlied." 

As will have become clear, the " Nibelungenlied " 
naturally falls into two parts, culminating, the former 
in Sigfried's death, the latter in the massacre at 
Attila's court, but there is no unity of inner structure 
in either portion. Passages of the deepest feeling 
and pathos alternate not only with those of rugged 
strength, but also with what is trivial, grotesque, or 
even silly. Then, too, the connection of the episodes 
is not always clear. This is true here in a much 



14 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



greater degree than in the Homeric poems, and what- 
ever may be the final judgment in regard to these, it 
is hard to conceive that the " Nibelungenlied " can 
have been the product of a single mind. Rather 
does it seem a result of the editing and combining, 
with a freedom characteristic of the time, of epic 
songs that had long been current among the people, 
changing from generation to generation, and taking 
different forms in the various Germanic dialects, but 
caught for us, like some petrifaction of a bygone age, 
in the shape that it had taken in Austria, perhaps at 
Vienna, between the years 1190 and 1210. 

Though the " Nibelungenlied " is the greatest, it is 
by no means the only epic formed from songs in 
High Germany. There is one that tells of the death 
of the great Gothic king, Ermenrich, of the race of 
the Amalungs, to which Theodoric also belonged, 
though many generations later. Here, however, the 
legends are fused, and the culmination of the " Die- 
trichsage " is Theodoric's conquest of- Italy. Others 
tell of Sigfried's youthful adventures. But soon the 
popular epic begins to take on a local color. The 
High Germans grow jealous of the epic glories of 
the Nibeluug hero from the lower Rhine, and in 
" Biterolf " and the " Rosengarten " they make Theo- 
doric and Sigfried contend for the mastery, and ven- 
ture at length to award the palm to the Southern 
champion. Gradually Sigfried becomes the sport 
of fancy, and the type of youthful heroism sinks 
at last to the Saufritz of the farm-yard and the 
nursery. 



THE ORIGINS. 



15 



Another group of High German legends gathers 
ahout the Vandal brothers, Ortnit and Wolfdietrich. 
Here, too, the " editing " is more extensive than in 
the " Nibelungen," and by a series of strange geo- 
graphical misunderstandings of names that possibly 
were already distorted in the original songs, the 
" editors " have taken the brothers, now to Eussia, 
now to Eome. There is a striking similarity in the 
tale to the classic story of Castor and Pollux, but the 
special students of this literature regard conscious 
imitation as extremely improbable. 

These stories belong wholly to High Germany and 
to Austria. A third group shows as clearly its Low 
German origin. For here the hero's home is the sea, 
and viking raids are his glory ; but yet, by the ocean 
as among the hills, loyalty, faithfulness, " Treue," is 
the burden of the song. In this group the place of 
the " Nibelungen " is taken by the story of " Gudrun." 
The legend has a peculiar interest to Englishmen, 
for the time and the local color is that of the raids of 
Danes and Northmen on the coasts of England and 
Ireland. The ocean and the shore are the scene of 
action, and the subject is as old, and as ever new, as 
the story of Europa or of Helena. The suitor, noble, 
beloved, but rejected by jealous parents, flies with 
his stolen bride. Then follows the pursuit, the 
battle, and, in the mediaeval tales, as universally, the 
reconciliation and the marriage ; a solution which 
offers suggestive points of contrast to the classical 
conception. 

The " Gudrunsaga " tells us how King Hagen of 



16 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Ireland had a daughter Hilde, passing fair, whose 
suitors that genial monarch was accustomed to kill or 
hang. But King Hettel of Denmark is not easily 
discouraged, and his messengers persuade the willing 
daughter to escape to him with them over-sea. He 
meets his bride on the shore, but the enraged father 
is in hot pursuit, and the lover has to maintain his 
right in a fight on the beach, that is described with 
great verve. Here Hettel magnanimously saves 
Hagen's life, and all ends in happy reconciliation. 

This little tale of the wooing of Hilde is a prelude 
to the more pitiful story of Hilde's daughter, Gudrun, 
whose legend at the first is a close parallel to that of 
her mother. She, too, is the chosen love of a foreign 
prince, Herwig of Zealand. But during their be- 
trothal, while her lover and her father are fighting 
the Moors, she is carried away forcibly by Herwig's 
rival, Hartung, Prince of Normandy. The father 
here, as before, pursues, and Herwig with him. Again 
we have a fine battle scene, but with a tragic close, 
for Hettel is killed, and Hartung carries away Gudrun 
into seven years' hard captivity, though she suffers no 
other violence. At last her lover and her brother, 
Ortwin, come to rescue her, and after some indecisive 
strife the reconciliation is effected, here as in Hilde's 
case, by the women, Gudrun and her captor's sister 
Ortrun. 

In both parts of the "Gudrunsaga" magnanimity 
overcomes vengeance. It represents a higher moral 
development, a more Christian standard, than could 
be found in the " Nibelungen." And as this would 



THE ORIGINS. 



17 



lead one to expect, there is more thought fulness and 
a deeper insight into the mixed feelings of complex 
human nature. Once and again we read how " sorrow 
and joy mingled " at some crisis of the story. But 
there is nothing effeminate, no sickly sentimentality, 
in " Gudrun " as there is in some of the later related 
epics. And together with these evidences of higher 
culture we find a more delicate humor. As the 
" Gudrun " has nothing to parallel the rollicking- 
burlesque of Gunther's wedding experiences, so the 
" Nibelungen " has no trait like that where Herwig, 
battling to rescue Gudrun and hard beset, looks 
anxiously to the castle battlements, fearful lest Gud- 
run may be a spectator of his ill fortune and find 
in it material for reproach if ever they are united. 

The " Guclrun," then, is truer to the culture of the 
thirteenth century, and shows greater psychological 
insight than the " ISTibelungen," but it was less popu- 
lar in High Germany, the section which was coining 
more and more to have the literary pre-eminence. 
It naturally appealed less to the popular taste from 
the very fact that it was a more artistic masterpiece, 
and, besides, it was not of their immediate country 
and people ; it was more foreign in its scenes and 
heroes, more so, indeed, than the half Danish epic of 
Beowulf had ever been to the English. The " Nibe- 
lungen," even in its existing states, for there are 
three versions, was an essentially popular product. 
The " Gudrun," while it had a like origin in epic 
songs, had an original poet for its author, and shows 
a conscious plan of development. And thus it forms 

2 



IS 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



a connecting link between the wholly popular epics 
and the foreign but more studied epics of the court, 
standing, perhaps, in closest literary relation to the 
truly national and yet thoroughly individual lyrics of 
Walther von der Vogelweide. 

The popular epic in Germany was essentially real- 
istic. Indeed this is true in some measure of all 
popular forms of literature, however fanciful. The 
epics of the court were in their essence more idealistic 
and romantic, and so more artificial. Here love, 
"Minne," is the mainspring of action, just as fidelity 
had been in the other case. This conception of 
chivalrous love came with much else of finer culture 
from France, and so naturally the first expression of 
literary activity in this field shows immediately its 
French origin. Already in the twelfth century the 
German knights who looked to France for their 
maimers were able to hear singers in their own 
tongue tell of the loves of Floris and Blanch eflor, of 
Tristan and Isolde, as well as of iEneas and Dido. 
The last tale was the first to become genuinely and 
widely popular, but this was due less to its own merits 
than to the genius of Heinrich von Yeldecke, whose 
version of Virgil's story brought him the title of Father 
of Courtly Poetry. It was he that gave it its dis- 
tinctive artistic form and polish, and more than all, 
he gave German verse true rhyme. 

We may best connect Veldecke with that famous 
Whitsuntide of 1184, when 70,000 German knights 
gathered at Mayence as guests of the Emperor 
Frederic Barbarossa at the knighting of his sons, 



THE ORIGINS. 



19 



Henry and Frederic. For it was about this time 
that Yeldecke's "Eneid" was finished, and it was 
among the poets gathered at this festival that his 
supremacy was first conceded and that his reforms 
in German verse were recognized as worthy of study 
and imitation. 

Like his predecessors, Lambrecht and Conrad, and 
like his successors, Hartmann, Gottfried, and the rest, 
Yeldecke took his material from the French with 
hardly less liberty than they had shown toward their 
Latin originals. But the Latin proved ultimately a 
less congenial source of inspiration than the Celtic, 
and, while several writers succeeded Veldecke in his 
chosen field, none approached the popularity of those 
who turned to the legends of Arthur, of the Grail, 
and of Charlemagne. 

Among these greater successors of Yeldecke the 
first in time is Hartmann von Aue, whom it is con- 
venient to connect with the crusade of 1197, in which 
he shared. But, while his w 7 ork is older than the 
present form of the " Nibelungenlied," he represents 
a wholly different stage of literary development, a far 
more refined taste, and a more conventional standard 
of manners and morals. His style shows the danger 
to which this form of literature is always prone, that 
is, an artificial straining at effect, which appears here 
in the antitheses. He chooses such subjects as 
Gregory " the good sinner," or Henry " the royal 
leper." His " Eric " is divided between love of Enid 
and duty to king and knighthood, and his " Iwein/' 
after a similar conflict, abandons his love at the call 



20 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



of chivalry. These last two are as genuine Don 
Quixotes as he of La Mancha. but indeed this might 
be said to some extent of all the distinctively Arthurian 
heroes. Both " Eric " and " Iwein " were originally 
products of the prolific pen of Chrestien de Troyes, a 
Frenchman who had been a refugee at the court of 
Flanders, and may thus have been brought to the 
attention of the German poet. But in his treatment 
of Chrestien's material Hartmann is very free. He 
softens, refines, glozes. He is more conventional, 
Chrestien is more natural, more Gaulois. And, as be- 
fitted his conventionality, Hartmann had a more 
perfect mastery of form than had yet been seen in 
Germany. He wholly discards the strophe, and in 
the couplet he finds free space to develop his epic 
conceptions more perfectly than the popular poets 
had ever done. 

This was recognized in his own lifetime as his 
chief title to fame and emulation by the greatest of 
his rivals, Gottfried von Strassburg, who is Hartmann's 
inferior only because he carries to excess the qualities 
that are still virtues in the elder poet. His antitheti- 
cal mode of expression becomes in Gottfried a teasing 
mannerism. Yet it would be unjust to pass lightly 
over the really wonderful polish and delicacy of 
his verse and the playful ease of these very anti- 
thetical elaborations. In him the court epic becomes 
more artificial, and, as is natural in a developing 
art, more subjective. These characteristics would 
seem to fit Gottfried more than any other poet of the 
time to treat the legend of Tristan and Isolde, a tale 



THE ORIGINS. 



21 



that had interested the earliest of the court poets 
more than half a century before. 

To this legend, known throughout Europe and 
through all the Middle Ages, Gottfried gave its final 
and most artistic form, for in this tale of irresistible 
and unresisting love he had found precisely the sub- 
ject for his overwrought genius. The scene is alter- 
nately Cornwall and Ireland. Tristan, the hero, is a 
pattern of knightly graces and accomplishments, 
Isolde, his lady-love, is a type of courtly frailty ; and 
the tragic end of their unreflecting love is made rather 
a reproach to the world than to their own hearts. 
Indeed, Gottfried does not hold them morally respon- 
sible for a love which, according to the received 
standards must be called guilty, nor therefore for the 
consequences of their love. For Gottfried represents 
in his ethics a sophistical age, in which the catholic, 
ascetic theory existed unquestioned, side by side with a 
practice of life that wholly ignored and neglected it. 

Gottfried died in 1210. In him the courtly epic 
begun about 1170 by Eilhard of Oberge, advanced by 
Heinrich von Veldecke, reaching its summit in Hart- 
mann von Aue, begins its over-refinement and so pre- 
pares for its decline, which was very speedy after 
Gottfried's death. But contemporary with these, 
though aside from them, there was a courtly poet 
who, in the judgment of his time and of ours, exceeded 
them all, — Wolfram von Eschenbach, whom some 
have not scrupled to call the greatest of German 
writers before Goethe. 

Wolfram was a Bavarian. He must have been 



22 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



born between 1160 and 1170, aud he appears to have 
died about 1220. His style would place him be- 
tween the courtly and the popular poets, with some- 
what more affinity to the latter; but he shows a 
greater mastery of language and less respect for the 
traditions of vocabulary or syntax than any of his 
contemporaries. This may be partly accounted for 
by the fact, which he has himself recorded, that he 
could neither read nor write, for this would naturally 
make him a more independent thinker. He had cer- 
tainly far the deepest, if not the clearest, mind of his 
age, but he did not lose himself in metaphysical 
speculation, and had more grasp on real life in his 
literary work than any of his contemporaries. This 
is the source of his constant, never failing humor. 
To this we owe his sometimes startling metaphors. 
He compares a girl to a hare, to an ant, and for her 
walk to a duckling. Deep-set eyes are called cisterns, , 
and a man's hair is compared to pig's bristles. In 
such metaphors he approaches more than any of his 
German fellow-poets to the naive Chrestien, w T ho was 
his source of inspiration as well as theirs. 

Wolfram began his literary life with love-songs, 
usually telling of the sweet sorrow of parting when 
the watchman warns the lovers of the unwelcome 
sunrise. The idea had been brought to Germany 
from Provence, but nowhere has it been so exquisitely 
treated as by Wolfram. But when he grew older he 
bade farewell to this rather frivolous verse. He had 
begun to be attracted by more serious problems than 
a lover's good-bye. His two chief epics, " Parzival " 



THE ORIGINS. 



23 



and " Willehalm," both deal with great spiritual 
questions, with the relations of the Christians to the 
heathen, or with the freedom of the will and the 
metaphysical conception of a self-centred religion 
which works out its own salvation through doubt by- 
steadfastness and honest effort. 

Here both question and answer are those of Goethe's 
" Faust," and indeed the whole philosophy of " Par- 
zival," in this age of Catholic supremacy, is Protes- 
tant to the core. The development of this philo- 
sophical theme gives occasion for shrewd and keen 
criticism of court life and of chivalry ; for while Par- 
zival represents spiritual knighthood, his half-brother, 
the Saracen Feirifisz, and the Christian Gawain serve 
as types of unspiritualized chivalry. Though Wol- 
fram's poem is taken from Chrestien, it surpasses the 
French in external finish as in inner depth, and so 
was worthy to become, as Gottfried's was for Tristan, 
the final form of the Grail saga in Europe, and the 
foundation on which Wagner has built the supreme 
effort of his musical genius. 

Wolfram's second epic, " Willehalm," is also French 
in origin and in the main historical. Here the 
central idea is toleration, and we read how the hero- 
saint was careful to bury the heathen dead with the 
rites of their own faith. In this poem, as in " Par- 
zival," Wolfram's realism has led him to interweave 
most charming scenes of household joys and wedded 
love, which a lesser poet might have thought beneath 
the dignity of his theme. Their equal is not to be 
found till we come to the ripeness of Goethe's genius. 



24 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Wolfram was indeed a noble man as well as a great 
poet. In the simple words of his own epitaph at 
Eschenbach, he was " a gallant knight and a master 
singer." 

There is no need to linger over the decline of the 
courtly epic. Thirty years (1190-1220) produced in 
quick succession all the greater works, whose entrance 
on the scene was accompanied by a chorus of singers, 
weak only by comparison. During this period al- 
most all were translators or adapters from the French. 
Later, perhaps because this source failed, the poets 
gave a wider scope to a feebler fancy. Popular 
legends, and even the English story of King Oswald, 
passed through their transforming hands, though at 
best they show rather new combinations of the ele- 
ments furnished by the now familiar French legends 
than any true originality. Among these later poems, 
" Titurel " a continuation of " Parzival," may be 
named, both because it was long regarded as the 
work of Wolfram himself and because it furthered 
the growth of the story of Parzival's son, Lohengrin, 
who is familiar as the hero of a popular opera. 

During the thirteenth century this courtly epic 
slowly died away of over-production and artificiality. 
Imaginative literature begins to yield in interest to 
history. Eorm is less prized than matter. Thus we 
see reflected in literature the decay of the delicate 
culture that had bloomed its brief day under the 
magnanimous sceptre of the great Frederics, and be- 
neath the fostering care of the German nobility, often 
themselves poets as well as patrons of literature. 



THE ORIGINS. 



25 



It is curious to notice how the decay retraces the 
steps of the development. The poets before 1190 
had been drawn at first from the clergy, then from 
the wandering clerks and the students. From the 
classic heights and the noble poets the course leads 
down through the professional wandering minstrels 
back to the clergy again, in whose hands the epic 
becomes homily and allegory, and soon sinks be- 
neath notice. But while the epic was thus fading 
away, lyric poetry was rising to the first place in the 
person of Walther von der Vogelweide, the most 
interesting personality of this period. 

Walther was an Austrian, and devoted to the cause 
of Duke Frederic until that prince's death, in 1198. 
After that he claimed a wider allegiance, and we 
can trace his course at various German courts until 
1227, when it may be presumed that he died. He 
took an active part in the political struggles of his 
time, and was a real power in the civil wars of the 
period, where his influence was as much sought by 
Ids friends as it was feared by his foes. Through it all 
Walther was an unswerving patriot. Though he had 
lived in France and Italy, it is still the German ways 
to which his heart fondly clings. To him German 
men are courteous above others, and German women 
are angels. However much he might change his 
princely allegiance, it was always in obedience to a 
higher national patriotism, which made him an out- 
spoken enemy of the papal power at a time when 
such opposition as his was a sign of rare courage. 
He did not scruple to call the pope " a new Judas," 



26 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



" a servant of the devil," and he was bold to attribute 
to him all the political ills of Germany. These con- 
victions he spread among the people by short catches 
and songs that clung in the memory. The Italian 
Dean, To mas in, said Walther was a demagogue. No 
doubt he was a political agitator, but Germany had 
no such lyric poet until Goethe. 1 

His followers were not his equals, except perhaps 
in the little love-songs that make the chief charm of 
this Minnesangsfriihling, the " Springtime of Love." 2 
But these lyrics, many of them very beautiful and 
most of them set to music composed by the authors 
themselves, are almost without exception anonymous. 
It is plain that they were a fashionable occupation of 
cultured men who had no care for literary fame. 

The fate of this lyric poetry was similar to that of 
the epic. It suffered first from artificiality, then from 
vulgarization. Ulrich von Lichtenstein typifies the 
first stage, Neidhart von Eeuenthal the second. 3 Ul- 
rich was a Don Quixote of chivalrous love, capable of 
cutting off a finger to send to his lady-love to appease 
her humor, a man who made a " pilgrimage " under 
the guise of Venus, and challenged all knights who 

1 Scherer, 1. c. 209. 

2 Noteworthy and noted among them is the little gem that may 
serve as a specimen of the class: — 

" Thou art mine, I am thine; 
Let this be the certain sign; 

Thou in my heart 

Art locked apart, 
And I 've lost the little key; 
Thou must ever stay with me. 

8 Ulrich died in 1255 ; Neidhart in 1240. 



THE ORIGINS. 



27 



met him to contend for the honor of his Dulcinea, — 
a courtier, in short, who imitated all the crack-brained 
fancies of Tristan in his love for Isolde, and all the 
time rejoiced in a wife and a numerous family at 
home. He led a double existence. Of his life as a 
a reputable pater-familias he is silent, but he has 
written a diary of his romantic love-fancies, his 
" Frauendienst," in which are numerous poems that 
would be charming but for their persistent artificiality 
of form and sentiment. 

The next downward step of lyric poetry is taken 
when the noble poets become conscious that the sen- 
timentalities of chivalry are inherently ridiculous, 
and fair game for wit. Ulrich was pathetically seri- 
ous ; Neidhart is a satirist. His gay dance-songs 
hit noble and peasant alike, but especially the latter, 
with a humor that is often coarse, but always delicious. 
And Neidhart's poetry has a social significance that 
should not be overlooked. Satire, to have point, must 
have some basis of truth. Neidhart's verses assume 
a prosperity among the German peasants in the 
thirteenth century that has never been witnessed 
among them since. 1 The fundamental assumption of 
his wit is that the peasants have wealth without cul- 
ture, and the nobles culture without corresponding 
wealth. The incongruousness of these conditions is 
his standing theme. His songs are very dramatic, 
and in tripping dance measures they tell of the tricks 
played on the nut-brown country maids by the impe- 

1 This is also the date of the greatest prosperity of the English 
yeoman. See Rogers, "Work and Wages." 



28 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



cunious and facile nobleman, a good deal in the spirit 
of Chaucer's Eeeve. 

As usual, the coarseness of Neidhart fc und more 
imitators than his wit, and In the next generation 
Tannhauser (d. 1270) sacrifices completely the dig- 
nity of poetry to the itch to raise a laugh. His 
comic songs, which usually quite pass the limits of 
the decorous, are wont to end with the sudden excla- 
mation, " Ah ! I 've broken the string," just at the 
moment when it seems impossible that his tale and 
propriety can be maintained together. 

In Ulrich von Lichtenstein love had been the seri- 
ous business of life. In Neidhart von Eeuenthal love 
is vulgarized, commonplace. In Tannhauser love is 
a jest. The shafts struck home. At the beginning of 
the fourteenth century chivalrous love poetry was 
dead and buried in Germany. For this century wit- 
nesses a shifting in the political life of the German 
nation that did not fail to have an immediate effect 
on its literature. In the progress of society and the 
State, knights and knighthood had become less impor- 
tant to the nation, less able, and perhaps less disposed 
to be the patrons of literature. And on the other 
hand the free cities were growing in wealth and 
power, and so began to aspire to literary distinction, 
which till then had seemed the prerogative of the 
courts. This shifting of the literary centre is marked 
by a new name, " Meistersanger," Mastersingers, fa- 
miliar as the title of a noted opera. Nuremberg was 
the chief centre of this artificial literary life, which 
aimed to apply to poetry the commercial and eco- 



THE ORIGINS. 



29 



nomic spirit that had given the free cities their politi- 
cal recognition. The natural result was a stagnant 
lake of mediocrity, prolific only in the lowest forms 
of life. One might be disposed to make an exception 
for Hans Sachs, whose genuine poetic genius was 
cramped by his traditions and surroundings to such 
an extent that few of those to whom the name is 
familiar know a line of his countless verses. Those 
of his contemporaries are buried deep, lapped in the 
lead of their own duhiess. 

The old order was giving place to the new in these 
generations. Life was less ornate, less beautiful, less 
cultured, but it was more serious and more realistic. 
The fourteenth century saw the establishment of the 
first German universities, 1 and it should be remem- 
bered that the influence of these institutions was not 
favorable to idealism or the culture of the imagina- 
tion. The classics were studied more from a literal 
than from the aesthetic side, and hence they were 
slower to purify taste here than elsewhere in Europe. 
In literature naturalism was stretched almost to the 
verge of shamelessness, and the result is tersely 
stated by Scherer to be that " this whole period, into 
the seventeenth century, produced no poetic work of 
art that could satisfy even elementary demands in 
purity of form." 

The drama had now become the most important 
field of literary activity. Vast numbers of carnival 
plays and farces were written, many of them witty and 

1 Prague, 1348 ; Vienna, 1365 ; Heidelberg, 1387 ; Erfurt, 1392. 
These exist to-day. Cologne, founded 1388, is abandoned. 



30 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



all of them vulgar. Progress, such as it was, came 
mainly from abroad, especially from Italy and France* 
both by adaptation and direct translation. Some- 
what later they began to draw on the classical Latin - 
comedy also. 

In other forms of poetry this epoch produced very 
little. A few songs have survived, and in epic verse 
there is the social and political satire " Eeineke Fuchs," 
which busied High and Low German poets till Goethe 
gave it its final form. Didactic poetry naturally 
fills a larger place as we approach the Keformation, 
but in this class Brandt's " Ship of Fools " is the only 
work that would interest to-day, unless perhaps it 
were the " Weisskunig" of the emperor Maximilian I., 
who was also the author of " Theuerdank," a book 
somewhat in the style of Wolfram, and the com- 
piler of a collection of old German legends, the 
" Heldenbuch." 

But it is evident that prose is the natural vehicle 
of literary expression in a realistic age, and it is to 
prose that the Germans turned more and more during 
this period. The older poems were now laboriously 
turned into this form to suit the altered taste, and 
the heroic tales that had this fate are precisely the 
epics that held their place longest in the popular 
memory. Foreign fiction was now habitually trans- 
lated into prose, and the fifteenth century saw in 
" Eulenspiegel " and his unsavory tricks the first in- 
dependent attempt at German fiction. Meantime 
legal books had appeared in German, while sermons, 
treatises on medicine, and summaries of popular 



THE OBIGINS. 



31 



science were soon to abound, as was to be expected 
when we consider that seven additional universities 
had been founded during the fifteenth century. 

These universities became almost immediately the 
stronghold of the " Humanists," a body of men who 
sought a literary and social reform through a revival, 
first, of classical study, then of study generally ; and 
as it happened, they were drawn to concentrate their 
attention on philology as applied to Biblical text and 
translation. Thus, though themselves Catholics, they 
prepared for the Eeformation. The typical "Hu- 
manist " is Erasmus, " a witty philologue, who knew 
how to prize elegant worldly life, and sought by much 
writing to further the spread of his own neat, grace- 
ful, and rather formal Latin style, but who found his 
highest task in applying philological methods to holy 
Scripture." 1 Though he never broke with the estab- 
lished church, he was the pioneer of the higher criti- 
cism, and would have sympathized with the most 
advanced investigators of to-day. His criticism of 
the text of the Latin Vulgate could not be answered, 
aud served to shake the already undermined founda- 
tions of the traditional faith. His reformed text was 
made the basis of Luther's epoch-making version. 
The work of Erasmus, Keuchlin, and their fellows in 
weakening the influence of the clergy before the 
Eeformation had been openly proclaimed is not 
always realized. Much should be ascribed to them 
that is commonly attributed to Luther. 

For in general it grows clear that the Reformation 
1 Scherer, 1. c. 272. 



32 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



was not the work of one man nor of one generation. 
The spirit of Waltlier and Wolfram is as essentially 
Protestant as the spirit of Luther and Melanchthon, 
and at no time in the interval had witnesses been 
wanting to the popular protest against the corruptions 
of the mediaeval hierarchy. Yet it was more against 
the Church as a political power and in its economic 
aspects than against its doctrinal teachings that the 
revolt was directed, and in the popular consciousness 
the new theology was accepted as the condition and 
excuse of the social and political change that they 
felt to be imperative. From the political and eco- 
nomic standpoint a reformation was a necessity, and 
probably this Preformation, with all its errors and 
bitter injustice, was the best practicable one. The 
point is important to our literary purpose. Since we 
have to do witli a political rather than with a moral 
convulsion, we shall see its prelude in the gradual 
decay of culture and taste, till both come near ex- 
tinction ; and we shall look, during its progress, for a 
great increase of writing and printing, accompanied 
with an almost total cessation of pure literature. 

But in the midst of this literary stagnation the 
Eeformation produced a work of crucial importance 
from a philological standpoint, — Luther's transla- 
tion of the Bible. Not as though the Scriptures had 
not been translated and printed in German before his 
day. There had been eighteen earlier printed edi- 
tions, and translations in manuscript had circulated 
freely from early times. But from a literary point of 
view all these had been lame efforts. Luther gave 



THE ORIGINS. 



33 



in his Bible a literary model to Germany comparable 
only to our own Authorized Version. Begun about 
Christmas, 1521, the New Testament was printed 
before the close of 1522, the whole Bible in 1534, 
and a revision in 1541, and this has remained essen- 
tially the German Bible until our own day. Men 
may differ in their moral judgment of the German 
Reformation ; none can close their eyes to the vast 
gain to literature and culture that sprang from this 
book, the foundation of the new German language. 
For from that time the various dialects were recoo- 
nized as definitely relegated to a subordinate place. 
Germany had once more a universal literary medium, 
not artificial now, but caught from the lips of the 
people. The Reformation w 7 as in the air. It was the 
work of all Germany. The translation of the Bible is 
Luther's peculiar and immortal honor. 

For, while Germany was divided confessionally 
by the Reformation, it was united as it had never 
been in the vehicle of its literary expression. Bavaria 
and Brandenburg, the Lower Rhine and Austria found 
a common bond in this new community of intellectual 
communication. The change was accepted with such 
eagerness that we hear of books printed in 1515 that 
required modernized editions in 1540. All the gram- 
marians of the century took Luther's Bible as the 
standard, so that before 1G00 it had established an 
undisputed sway from the North Sea and the Baltic 
to the Danube and the Alps. 

Luther's pamphlets and hymns contributed also to 
fix the German language, and the latter, especially 



34 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



the translations from the Latin, have at times con- 
siderable literary merit, though they lack a delicate 
sense of form. His university at Wittemberg was 
also zealous to spread his language with his teaching 
in every part of Germany, and these joint influences 
survived his death and the incompetence of his im- 
mediate successors. 

Still, though Luther had given Germany a literary 
language, it was yet two centuries from a revival of 
literature, for the Reformation proved quite as un- 
sympathetic to culture as ever the old Church had 
been. What people wrote and printed at this time 
is in the main forgotten save by special students, to 
whom, if they find any nourishment in it, it is only 
charity to leave it undisputed. For what little pro- 
gress might be chronicled in the century that sepa- 
rated the Diet at Worms from the Thirty Years' War 
was effectually stifled by that awful nemesis. 1 Ger- 
many, that had cast the firebrand of religious strife 
in the midst of Europe, was first to suffer and last to 
recover from the burning. That war left Germany 
with barely a third of her former population, less 
than a third of her former wealth. It was necessary 
laboriously to reacquire ideals and standards in 
aesthetics and literature. The beginnings of this pre- 
liminary labor were made by the literary societies, 
especially in Hamburg and Leipzig, and almost ex- 
clusively by university men, and their efforts were 

1 This is the century of the original Faust-play, of the satirist 
Fischart (1550-1590), of Sachs (1514-1569), and of the poet- 
reformer, Opitz (1597-1639). 



THE ORIGINS. 



35 



greatly assisted by the religious toleration that the 
Thirty Years' War had forced on the exhausted com- 
batants as a political necessity. Intellectual free- 
dom was a reality in Germany, or at least in Prussia, 
earlier than elsewhere in Europe. Such liberty as 
was known at the court of the great Frederic was 
not to be found by the Seine nor even by the 
Thames. 

The fruit of this freedom of thought was sure, but 
it was slow to ripen. Few names rise above medi- 
ocrity in the century that followed the Peace of 
Westphalia. The most noteworthy in view of what 
was to follow is Paul Gerhardt (d. 1676) perhaps the 
most popular writer of religious verse in Germany. 
His most striking characteristic is a subjective senti- 
mentality, often lapsing into weakness, that makes 
him far inferior to the robust Luther. But yet it 
seems to have been this very quality that inaugurated 
the subjectivity in German lyric poetry which in its 
final development gave the songs of Goethe and 
Heine their pre-eminent place in European literature. 

That Gerhardt's sentimentality reflected the taste 
of the time appears from the contemporaneous idyls 
and pastorals with their attempted euphuism, on 
which there followed swiftly the natural reaction, the 
pseudo-naturalistic tale of blood and murder, pos- 
sibly begotten under the star of the Spanish novela 
picaresca. 

Grimmelshausen's " Simplicissimus," the only story 
of the century that is worthy to survive, may mark 
for us the beginning of modem German fiction. This 



36 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



wonderfully realistic tale of the Thirty Years' War, 
in which the author himself bore a part, struck so 
popular a chord that it evoked a crowd of imitators, 
who outbade one another in tales of wild and warlike 
adventure. Spanish influence can be traced also in 
the feeble efforts at satiric fiction modelled on Cer- 
vantes and Quevedo ; and by the side of these there 
soon appears a third current, the tales of travel and 
shipwreck, with their source in the English "Robinson 
Crusoe," showing usually a strong but untrained im- 
agination and very little artistic finish. Here rivalry 
led naturally to a riotous excess which furnishes the 
excuse and the point of the satires of Munchausen 
and Schelmuffsky, the comic liars of German litera- 
ture. The imitations of " Robinson Crusoe " are 
hardly to be counted. There is a whole literature 
of Bobinsonaden, the Italian Robinson, the Dutch, 
French, Saxon, Silesian, and Swiss Family Robinson * 
then there is the "Insel Felsenburg," perhaps the 
best in this kind, a tale of an earthly paradise, with 
its Adam and Eve and the kingdom they founded ; all 
quite in the style, and at the last clearly under the 
influence, of Rousseau's theories of nature and society. 
Meantime the drama had sunk to hopeless vulgarity ; 
so while poetry verged in Gerhardt on the extreme 
of sentimentality, prose had gone to the extreme of 
naturalism. 

These two tendencies, each opposed to the other, 
and both opposed to good art, were first effectively 
checked by the influence of the French classical poets, 
through their great champion Gottsched. But when 



THE ORIGINS. 



37 



ouce French sobriety had served its purpose its ex- 
treme advocates, Gottsched and his school, became 
rather a hindrance than a help to the more original 
men of the younger generation who chafed at foreign 
leading-strings and found a powerful though indirect 
support in their great king. For Frederic of Prussia 
both in war and peace was a thorough patriot. He 
did more than all other men together to rouse the 
national pride to self-conscious independence, and so 
it was fitting, when a new era was to dawn with un- 
exampled glory for German literature, that of the 
three men who should usher it in, Winkelmann and 
Klopstock should be Prussians by birth, and Lessing 
by his training. And here on the threshold of 
Frederic's reign (1740-1786), it is fitting to close 
this brief sketch of the origins of Modern German 
Literature. For the first-fruits are already blossom- 
ing, and Frederic lived ffco see the sure promise of the 
literary glories in which he had an essential though 
a silent part. 



33 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE FIRST-FRUITS : KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 

When Frederic II. ascended the throne of Prussia, 
Lessing was a boy of eleven, Wieland of seven years. 
Klopstock was a youth of sixteen, Gellert a young 
man of twenty-five. Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and 
Jean Paul Piichter were not yet born. 1 The literary 
interest of the day lay in a controversy between 
Gottsched and the Leipzig school on one side and 
Bodrner, Breitinger, and the Zurich school on the 
other, as to whether the French or English poets 
were the more worthy of imitation, since it was 
clearly necessary to imitate somebody. When Fred- 
eric died (1786) this controversy and the men who 
waged it were buried in oblivion with all their works. 
Lessing had already completed his epoch-making 
career (d. 1781), Klopstock had long passed the zenith 
of his powers, Herder had done his most important 
literary work, Goethe was just closing the first period 
of his unchallenged mastery, and Schiller was already 
approving himself a worthy compeer of that great 
Olympian. 

1 The dates are, Herder, 1744 ; Goethe, 1749 ; Schiller, 1759 ; 
Eichter, 1763. 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 



39 



This half-century represents a progress in literature 
and aesthetic taste that is hardly paralleled in his- 
tory. One may almost call it an intellectual revolu- 
tion. And in this a^e of marvels it is not the least 
among them that such a popular change should be in 
very large measure due to a king who troubled him- 
self directly very little about the German language 
and hardly at all about German literature. Ite 
spoke and wrote French habitually, and talked Ger- 
man, so he told Gottsched, " like a coachman," while 
he saw little to admire in the zeal of those who 
were even then recovering the " Nibelungenlied " 
from long oblivion. It seemed as though that prince 
of realists would show the world that the true patron 
of literature is not the monarch who scatters among 
authors his bounties and favors with royal munificence, 
but rather the king of men who can rouse his people 
to a broad and confident conception of their mission, 
and fill them with national enthusiasm, sure that 
that spirit, once aroused, will not fail to find a 
genuine literary expression. No nation has ever 
failed to say what it had to say. Let there be a 
noble thought to express, and the poet will not be 
wanting. The hour will bring the man. 

That enthusiasm, that noble thought, Frederic gave 
to Germany by his heroic struggle against the com- 
bined powers of Austria, France, and Eussia, in the 
Seven Years' War. By it Prussia became the rally- 
ing point of German national feeling, such a centre 
of force as had not existed since the Peace of West- 
phalia (1648). Aspirations became possible that till 



40 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



then could have been only fanciful chimeras. The 
overflowing current of patriotism burst out in Gleim's 
ringing " Sougs of a Prussian Grenadier," and men 
were indeed " proud to be Prussians/' as they still 
sing to-day in camp and schoolroom. Even the 
wider name of " German " was vindicated from a re- 
proach that had clung to it since the Eeformation. 

How could this new political life fail to reflect itself 
in literature ? It has never yet failed in the world's 
history. The classical period of the literature of Greece 
was the age that followed Marathon and Salamis, and 
the nation who had been leaders there were leaders 
here also. The age of Caesar and Augustus had 
swelled the Roman heart with a pride that we can 
but faintly realize, and literature answered to its tri- 
umph with the " ^Eneid " and the " Carmen Saeculare." 
The world -embracing ambition of Louis XIV. fired 
the imagination of the French and found its echo in 
the pulpit and on the stage. And in England, when 
God breathed and the Armada was scattered, when 
another world spread a boundless horizon of unfur- 
rowed seas before the stanch ships and stancher 
hearts of her mariners, when "girt with many a 
baron bold," the Virgin Queen vindicated English 
liberty, and yet again, when the Iron Duke checked 
the conqueror of Europe in the Peninsula to over- 
throw him at Waterloo, those glories had their literary 
expression in Shakspere and in Byron, each in a 
worthy company. So, as we have seen, it was in 
Germany in the days of Barbarossa and Frederic II., 
the Hohenstauf en emperors ; and so now a crown of 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDEE. 



41 



literary honor was to be added to the laurels of the 
Prussian king. 

On the other hand, mere military glory does not 
further literature. The age of Napoleon, his personal 
ambition of conquest and universal empire, remains 
unfruitful. The last war with France, nursed by 
Bismarck, desired by Moltke with all his puritan zeal 
and puritan limitations, brought indeed far greater ma- 
terial returns at far smaller cost than Frederic paid 
for Silesia ; but it brought no such literary blossom- 
ing. It is not military success, but active, unre- 
strained, political life, or a glorious and successful 
struggle for national existence and reformation that 
nurses the literary spirit ; and therefore the age of 
Frederic is greater than that of Louis, because thought 
is more free. 

This new national literary spirit would naturally 
manifest itself first in opposition to the French 
school with its headquarters at Leipzig, and Gottsched 
for its general. Gellert raises the national standard 
at home, while the Zurich school shake the allegiance 
of the provinces. Gellert was in no way a great poet, 
but he was on the right track and endeavored to op- 
pose a distinctively German spirit to Gottsched's 
cosmopolitanism. So, when Frederic summoned 
them both to his court, though his French sympa- 
thies prepossessed him in favor of the elder writer, 
he found Gellert " more intelligible," because he was 
more in touch with what was essentially national. 
Though himself a man witli no critical training, the 
king saw immediately that " Gellert was quite another 



42 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

man than Gottsched," and he did not scruple to 
change the title of certain complimentary French 
verses that he had in the first instance addressed to 
the latter, dedicating them in his printed works " Au 
Sieur Gellert," a change which naturally provoked 
much comment, though it accorded very well with 
the popular voice. 

It is interesting to notice this general recognition 
of Gellert's superiority to Gottsched, and this the 
more because he was only a mediocre poet. In him 
it was less the intrinsic excellence of the work that 
was enjoyed than the spirit in which it was written ; 
for their ready appreciation showed that the literary 
public of Germany was in advance of its authors, 
that the hour was waiting for the man. When that 
man of genius should come he would find an audi- 
ence ready to hear and able to understand his mes- 
sage. It was their hope that Gellert was that genius 
that gave him for a time such unbounded influence 
that, as one contemporary critic said, "With our 
public, to believe in Gellert, and in religion and 
virtue, is nearly the same thing." But now that lie 
can be judged in his true perspective it is clear that, 
though Gellert was often good, he was never great. 
His principle contributions to literature are fables in 
the style of Gay or Lafontaine. He wrote poor 
dramas and some good hymns also, moderating the 
sentimentality of Gerhardt. A worthy school of 
literary aspirants gathered around him, men who 
were ambitious to make of Leipzig a " Little Paris " 
with what Goethe called their "rouged-doll ideals," 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 



43 



for Gellert had no technique to teach. He was only 
the first to touch a popular note that others could 
touch as well as he. So the Leipzig school soon 
passed its zenith, and the scene shifts to Zurich, and 
a little later to Berlin. 

It has been the peculiar service of the Swiss to 
German literature to give to it, as models for study 
and imitation, the great English poets, Shakspere 
and Milton, whose literary positions contrasted so 
sharply with the prevailing French taste that ruled 
absolute in Germany when Bodmer threw down the 
gauntlet by his translation of " Paradise Lost," in 
1732 ; for it is significant of the Swiss literary char- 
acter that they were first attracted to the Puritan, 
and through him to the greater Elizabethan. Bodmer 
certainly went to strange extremes in his blind ad- 
miration of the blind poet, but in the controversy 
that followed, especially by his treatise on "The 
Marvellous in Poetry," he with his fellow-professor, 
Breitinger, did yeoman service in emancipating taste 
from the fetters of French classicism. He was to 
Germany, between 1732 and 1740, much what Cha- 
teaubriand was to France more than a half-century 
later. 

The first fruit of this English cultus was only a 
substitution of an English for a French model. It 
was still imitation that they sought. Indeed, the 
greatest service that Milton did for them was to lead 
them to Shakspere, to the free study of human life, 
emancipated from all conventions of an outgrown 
and spurious classicism. But the study of Milton 



44 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



was the direct inspiration of at least one work which, 
though hardly ever read, and certainly not readable, 
is so often mentioned that it deserves some notice 
here, — Klopstock's " Messias." 

Klopstock was nine years younger than Gellert, 
and had been associated with him and his school in 
Leipzig, from 1746 to 1748, while still a student. 
He had gone then as a private tutor to Langensalza, 
but in 1750 had been invited to Zurich by Bodmer, 
who saw in the early cantos of " Per Messias," pub- 
lished in 1748, a diligent use of his translations of 
Milton. He remained in Zurich till 1751, when lie 
went to Copenhagen on the invitation of King Fred- 
eric V. Here he lived till 1770, and completed the 
greater part of the " Messias." Political changes in 
Denmark brought him back to Germany, and he 
died in Hamburg in 1803. 

Klopstock is perhaps the only poet who has lived 
to old age under favorable literary conditions and yet 
never equalled his earliest work. The first three 
cantos of the " Messias," published at twenty-four, 
mark the highest point of his genius. The seventeen 
cantos that followed, stretching their slow length to 
1773, his odes, mainly pietistic, his very artificial 
" Art of Poetry," as well as the antiquarian patri- 
otism and obsolete mythology of his "Bardiete" and 
dramas, all show the best and purest intentions 
coupled with a certain unripeness and overwrought 
sentimentality that make his work almost as foreign 
to our modern thought as the " Heliand " or Otfrid ; 
far more so than " Paradise Lost." The " Messias " 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAXD, HERDEE. 



45 



is intended to be an epic of the life of Christ, but the 
epic movement is lost in pietistic contemplation. 
The writer feels too much himself to arouse strong 
feeling in others, and since the scala of these feelings 
is limited both by the nature of the case and by the 
character of the man, his work suffers from repetition 
far more than a vigorous objective narration would 
have done. " Klopstock should have endeavored to 
realize the conditions of ancient Palestine, and so he 
should have studied books of travel ; he should have 
studied his own environment, to find naive traits by 
which to characterize the populace of that time ; and 
he should have studied the clergy and fanatics of his 
own acquaintance to find models for the Scribes and 
Pharisees. But he did not think of that. He painted 
quite without studies, — without studies from life, 
without studies from books ; everything was taken 
merely from his heart. Earnest feeling was poured 
in soft and graceful form around his characters. 
Loftiness and dignity were predicated of their speech, 
bearing, walk, and mien." 1 Yet the persons of his 
epic lacked individual activity, and an anxious re- 
spect for the sacredness of his protagonist marred the 
promise of his strongest situations. So while Klop- 
stock marked an intellectual advance, he wholly failed 
in his effort to revive the German religious epic, be- 
cause, while subjectivity aud sentimentalism had by 
no means had their day, their application to religion 
was not in accord with the spirit of the age of Fred- 
eric, and grew less and less so as that age ad- 

1 Scherer, 1. c. 419-421, freely translated. 



46 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



vanced and the influence of Voltaire and the French 
Encyclopaedists grew. 

Klopstock wrote also a number of odes, some with- 
out rhyme, dealing now with religion, now with love, 
and always with sentiment. He also "improved" 
a number of Luther's hymns according to his more 
refined taste, the new versions contrasting with the 
old somewhat as Tate and Brady with King David. 1 
But if his services to thought and to poetry were 
small, his contributions, both direct and indirect, 
to philology and prosody were not insignificant. 
His rhymeless odes had led him to a more careful 
study of quantity than had yet been made in Ger-, 
man, and this work was an essential preliminary to 
the " Luise " of Voss, to " Hermann und Dorothea," 
and still more to the "Achilleis" of Goethe, and to 
the " Gazellen " of Platen, where indeed quantity in 
German is pushed beyond its reasonable limitations. 
He did much also to enrich the poetic voeabulan T . 
These merits, while they brought him no nearer to 
the public, made him a writer of much value to the 
poets who immediately followed him. 

Klopstock's patriotism was as genuine as his re- 
ligion, but it, too, suffered from his indefinite idealism. 
He had before him in the events of the day the 
highest inspiration ; but it seems as though proximity 

1 He wanted to change Luther's superb " Mitten wir im Lehen 
sind Mit dem Tod umfaugen" to " Wir der Erde Pilger sind : Mit 
dem Tod umfaugen." Still more Klopstockian is the mawkish 
"Miide, siindenvolle Seele, Mach dich auf, erloste Seele," for the 
picturesque " Schmiicke dich, o liebe Seele, Lass die dunkle Stiu- 
deuhoble." Both passages are cited by Scherer, 1. c. 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 47 



and experience, indispensable to the realist, were a 
hindrance to Klopstock. It is as if, to give a concep- 
tion literary treatment, he must think it far away in 
some misty pre-historic time, where his fancy could 
not be checked by the knowledge of his readers. 
This seems to have been Goethe's feeling, who in 
talking to Eckermann 1 recalled "that ode where he 
lets the German muse run a race with the British. 
When one thinks what a picture that makes when 
the two maidens run together and throw their legs, 
and raise the dust with their feet, one must see that 
the good Klopstock did not have before his eyes 
a living image and sensible perception of what he 
did, else he could never have made such a blunder." 
So, too, in the u Messias," Goethe thought that Klop- 
stock showed no talent or disposition for grasping the 
sensible world and for drawiug characters, "and so 
lacked what is most essential for an epic and dramatic 
poet, one might almost say for any poet at all " As 
for Klopstock's drama, " Hermann," the subject lay too 
far off, no one knew what to make of it, and so the 
representation remained without effect or popularity." 2 
He seemed wilfully to sacrifice his best opportunities. 
Thus when once he had anticipated Gleim in a su- 
perb " War-song," addressed to Frederic and his men, 
he must needs twist it later that it might apply to 
the Emperor Henry the Fowler in the tenth century, 
though even this is too modem ; and by instinct he 
prefers the period of Tacitus' " Germauia," from 
which he takes his subjects for odes and dramas on 

1 Gespiiiche, Nov. 9th, 1824. 2 lb., Feb. 16, 1826. 



48 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



" Hermann and Thusnelda," " Hermann's Fight," 
" Hermann and the Princess," and " Hermann's 
Death." Here, too, the example was to prove of 
more value than its intrinsic worth ; Klopstock 
pointed the way to Kleist for 'his " Hermannsscklacht," 
and to the novelists of the German migration, Freytag 
and Dahn. 

But if we regard all this work in itself and apart 
from its ultimate consequences we shall not be sur- 
prised that Frederic and the literary circle he gath- 
ered about him found little sympathy with the men 
of Zurich or with Klopstock. To them the " Mes- 
sias " > offered little and promised even less, for the 
whole tendency of Frederic's influence, both directly 
and indirectly, was to turn aside the current of Ger- 
man thought from sentimental enthusiasm and pie- 
tistic mysticism, to realistic study and practical 
activity, by which alone the nation could rest secure 
in its well-earned liberty, and in the wider scope he 
had won for its expansive energies. The change that 
Frederic wrought in the German mind will appear 
very clearly in the literary career of Wi eland. 

This amiable and very talented man had first 
launched what Dante calls the " little skiff of his 
genius " in the milk-and-water current of pietistic 
sentiment that had its source in the University of 
Zurich. In his literary life, which extended for more 
than half a century, it is interesting to trace the 
gradual revolutionizing of the theories and purposes 
of the orthodox Swiss in the hands of the free-thinking 
Prussians. 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 49 

Cristoph Martin W ieland was the son of a Swabian 
pastor, bora in 1733, and trained in his home in the 
straitest sect of German orthodoxy. When he was 
fourteen they sent him to a school at Klosterber- 
gen, where the principal exercises appear to have 
been confession, the telling of spiritual experiences, 
and mystic contemplation after the manner of the 
•German pietists of that clay. The religious enthu- 
siasm thus carefully nursed was coupled with surrep- 
titious reading of French sceptical philosophy. It 
is difficult to tell which of the two influences was the 
less calculated to produce a strong or practical char- 
acter. Their combination made him the sport of 
sentiment and feeling, while it removed the restraint 
of traditional authority. One of the first results was 
that the embryo saint at seventeen fell head over 
ears in love with a pretty cousin, whom he glorified 
in glowing prose and numberless verses, and though 
these verses were, as might have been expected, of 
no great intrinsic value, they are interesting because 
they give unmistakable proof of the young man's 
talent, and are a still more striking witness to his 
remarkable facility of production. 

The style of this first poetry was already a marvel 
of ease and fluency. His vivid fancy left the cold 
unreality of Klopstock far behind. And in the next 
year he went to Zurich, which Klopstock had left 
so short a time before that the new-comer might have 
seemed to Bodmer to take the place of the elder poet. 
His manuscripts had preceded him, and secured him 
a warm welcome from the heads of that prudent 

4 



50 



MODERN GEEMAN LITERATURE. 



school who were always on the alert to train worthy 
successors. 

In this intimate association with Bodmer, Wie- 
land's attention was at first occupied with plans for 
Biblical epics, still dear to the heart of the trans- 
lator of Milton. The pietistic influence outweighed 
for the present the philosophical tendency. It was 
in this spirit that he entered on a literary controversy 
with Gleim and a group of like-minded minor poets 
who had called their school Anacreontic, a name that 
may serve to indicate its ethical, though not its formal 
character. 

This controversy with these partial classicists was 
of crucial importance to Wieland's literary future. 
He fell under the spell of the Greek culture he op- 
posed, his pietism melted gradually beneath the 
bright sun of Epicurean rationalism, and he discov- 
ered in his own heart how narrow a verge separates 
Platonic affection from Anacreontic love. Disturbed, 
delighted, the pastor's son hastened to clothe this 
personal experience in literary form, and in his 
poetical studies of the " psychology of modern love " 
he broke irretrievably with the cherished ideals of 
the Puritans of Zurich. Bodmer could not but see 
that Wi eland was much more of a genius, but much 
less of a Milton, than his former protege, Klopstock. 

And so, in 1759, Wieland betook himself to the 
more genial atmosphere of Berne. He was now com- 
pletely emancipated from the spirit in which he had 
written " The Temptation of Abraham," the "Sym- 
pathies," and " Sentiments of a Christian," a spirit in 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 51 



which he could declare that the most doggerel hymn 
was better than the most charming Anacreontic ode. 
As was natural in a young man with his school train- 
ing and pietistic Swiss associations, he went quickly 
to the other extreme. He was soon involved in 
several discreditable love adventures, but he obtained 
an official appointment at Biberach in 1760, where 
his intimate association with Count Stadion and the 
emancipated but charming Sophie von Laroche, whose 
daughter and granddaughter were to play a part in 
Goethe's life, fostered the tendencies that led his 
naturally light heart further and further away from 
* a prudent worldliness to the verge of thoughtless 
hedonism. Out of this he grew in due time, married 
a decidedly home-spun, bread-and-butter wife, settled 
down to the daily round of a model husband, and 
became the father of fourteen children. 

Meantime these light-hearted days had left their 
literary mark. The Greek delight in the pleasures 
of sense is painted in " Nadine" with admirable skill. 
In "Don Silvio von Rosalva" (1764), he has imitated 
11 Don Quixote," for the sake of satirizing all forms 
of idealism in order to preach the realism of Shaftes- 
bury and Voltaire. The same facile convictions char- 
acterize the verses of this period, and at length in 
his "Comic Tales" he touches the border line of 
frivolity, if indeed he does not pass beyond the 
limits of the decorous. 

But into this new style Wieland carried all the 
graces of language that had distinguished his former 
work, and these new books were read by his former 



52 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



opponents. He had become the favorite author of the 
German nobility, while those who had once been his 
associates and sympathizers were burning the books 
of their Ichabod, by way of celebrating Klopstock's 
birthday at Gottingen. Now, whatever its effect on 
morals, this change in the circle of his readers was a 
peculiar good fortune for German style, for thus, since 
both schools of literature was attracted either to his 
former or to his later manner, his influence became 
more general than that of any other writer of the 
time. So Goethe, speaking in 1825, could say to 
Eckermann : " All High Germany owes its style to 
Wieland. It has learned many things from him, and 
not least of them the ability to express itself with 
propriety." And elsewhere (March 6th, 1830) he 
says that, however Wieland might imitate French 
forms and methods of description, "he remained 
always fundamentally German." 

While Wieland was still under the spell of worldly 
pleasures he took an important step toward a truer 
realism. His former admiration for Milton led him 
to a careful study of Milton's great predecessor, 
Shakspere, the deepest of the students of real life. 
But this study not only influenced all Wieland's sub- 
sequent work, it was to exercise also a direct effect 
on all the writers of his time. Before 1767 he had 
published translations, partial or complete, of twenty- 
two of tire Shaksperian dramas, most of which were 
up to thnt time hut little read in Germany. Mean- 
time, beside his work on Shakspere, he was learning 
much from the English novelists of his own genera- 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 53 



tion. Fielding became in a sense his model in real- 
istic fiction, though the German is the more con- 
sistently philosophical of the two. Thus Wieland 
assimilated both from Greece and from England, but 
yet he preserved always his German individuality. 

The best of Wieland's novels from the later part of 
this period of his development are less read than they 
deserve to be. " Agathon " (1767), " Musarion " 
(1768), and "Die Abderiten " (1774), should not 
have quite lost interest to-day. They are all Greek 
in their scenes and titles, but the veil is thin and the 
German purpose unmistakable. That purpose is 
always good-humored satire, tolerant, and rather 
epicurean. " Agathon " is essentially autobiographi- 
cal. The titular hero is introduced to us as a platonic 
enthusiast, an idealist, to whom is opposed Hippias, 
a materialistic sensualist. Neither can convert the 
other, but Agathon yields himself a willing captive 
to the charms of Danae, who may be supposed to 
represent French deism as opposed alike to pietism 
and to atheism. " Musarion," the tale of the conver- 
sion of a misanthrope to the joy of life, a sort of 
" philosophy of the graces," as Wieland called it, was 
slighter in character. Here the didactic purpose is 
directed ostensibly against Pythagoreans and Stoics, 
who stand once more for materialism and ideal- 
ism while Musarion represents the eclectic " via 
media." 

Between " Musarion " and " Die Abderiten " Wie- 
land exercised his versatile pen in other fields. The 
Christian drama of his youth had been a failure. He 



54 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



now found a more congenial task in light opera. 
But what proved most immediately profitable to him 
was the proclamation of his political views in " Der 
Goldene Spiegel," for this earned him a professor's 
chair at the University of Erfurt, in 1769 ; and three 
years later he was able to exchange that post for a 
higher honor at the court of Weimar, whither he was 
summoned to superintend the instruction of that 
young prince Karl August, who was destined to 
repay his teaching by a more enduring reward than 
is the lot of most princely tutors ; for his pupil was 
to occupy a bright eminence through all the coming 
period as, above all others, the German Mecsenas, 
the patron of letters, and the active promoter of all 
the intellectual activities of his time. At his court 
Wieland held an honorable and respected position 
for more than forty years, until his death, in 1813. 

This added dignity was naturally reflected in 
greater literary seriousness. "Die Abderiten," the 
best of his satires, contrasts the narrow provincialism, 
almost universal in Germany, with the cosmopolitan 
political ideas that were beginning to make their way 
in France. This purpose is masked behind a story 
of the efforts of the travelled philosopher, Democritos, 
to bring to his broader views the citizens of his 
native Abdera. Some of the episodes in this novel, 
for instance the " Donkey's Shadow " and the " Frogs 
of Latona," are far more widely known than the story 
of which they form an essential part. In all of 
these novels poems are freely interspersed, as was 
the custom in the older pastoral romances, though 



KLOPSTOCK. WIELAND, HERDER. 



55 



Wieland has introduced them with far more grace 
and tact. This pastoral manner seems to have struck 
his fancy, for in the later " Amadis and Idris " he 
followed it still more, perhaps too, closely. 

From the time of his removal to Weimar, Wieland 
devoted himself wholly to literature, and his literary 
quarterly, " Der Deutsche Merkur," became the means 
of spreading and confirming his influence throughout 
Germany. This influence had now become in the 
main a tendency to serene optimism, to purer taste, 
and the more general diffusion of a popular culture. 
But while Wieland sympathized with every mani- 
festation of genius he did not sympathize in the en- 
thusiastic excesses of younger men whom he had 
helped to rouse to the energy that characterizes this 
period of " storm and stress" (1770-1780). So far, 
however, as these men had in them any enduring- 
qualities, mutually helpful relations were soon estab- 
lished between them and him. The results of their 
attempted revolution of German taste, and more es- 
pecially their fond study of the middle ages, Wieland 
made wholly his own. And they, as young blood 
grew cooler, learned to understand and respect the 
now venerable master. 

It might be a small thing to Wieland that the 
Klopstockians of Gottingen should burn him in effigy, 
or that the Swiss charlatan, Lavater, should call on 
all good Christians to pray for his conversion ; but 
he must have felt more keenly the mockery of Goethe, 
who, in his brief period of intellectual unripeness, in 
his farce, " Gotter, Helden, unci Wieland," had made 



56 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



his classical mythology the subject of unsparing 
satire. Yet Wieland's outward equanimity was un- 
ruffled, and he enjoyed the keenness of Goethe's wit 
even when it was directed against himself. In the 
" Deutsche Merkur " he recommended Goethe's farce 
to his readers as an excellent bit of fun. War with 
such an antagonist was impossible to the magnani- 
mous Goethe. Indeed, he was among the first, at 
least among the generation of " storm and stress," 
to see the true worth of Wieland, and though the 
latter criticised Goethe's drama, " Gotz," as " a beauti- 
ful monstrosity," the young poet had to confess that 
" no one understood him better than Wieland." 

So when Goethe came to Weimar, in 1775, they 
soon got to be good friends. In the next year 
Goethe became a regular contributor to the " Deutsche 
Merkur." Soon after, Herder joined them, and that 
journal then became the organ of the Weimar school 
in general, and so attained a paramount influence in 
Germany, in which Wieland came to have only a 
secondary part. Of the intercourse between these 
men Goethe says : " My personal relations to Wie- 
land were always very good, especially at first, when 
I had him to myself. It was at my suggestion that 
he wrote his short stories. But when Herder came 
to Weimar Wieland grew unfaithful to me ; Herder 
drew him away from me, for the personal attraction 
of this man was very great." Again he says : " Wie- 
land was always good-humored, and, though he de- 
pended on no one's opinion, lie was clever enough to 
adapt himself to anything. He was like a reed which 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 



57 



the wind of opinions blows this way and that, while 
it remains always firm on its little root." 

The result of daily intercourse with these friends 
was to give new wings to Wieland's mobile genius. 
They showed him both by precept and example the 
rich mine that lay unworked in mediaeval Germany. 
They led him to Hans Sachs and, better still, to the 
court epic of the thirteenth century. No modern 
poet has caught so nearly the spirit of this unique 
epoch. No German verse recalls so vividly as " Geron 
der Adeliche " the best work of Hartinann von Aue. 

More original in form than " Geron," and indeed 
holding a place quite apart in German literature, is 
" Oberon," which is at once Wieland's best work, and 
at the same time the last product of his prime. This 
poem, in tripping, easy, eight-line stanzas, appeared 
in 1780. The subject was taken partly from a 
French romance, just as the older court epics had 
been, partly from Chaucer, and partly from Shak- 
spere's "Midsummer Night's Dream." The diction 
is limpid, the style brilliant. It can be read without 
effort, and yet it has a sustained interest, depending 
not alone on incident, but on a true development of 
character. 

Huon is a peer of Charlemagne's court. He has 
killed a son of the emperor, and is condemned by 
him to an adventure that seems to assure his death, 
but he executes it with Oberon's aid, and wins in its 
course the love of Eezia, daughter of the Caliph of 
Bagdad. A broken vow, on his return to France, 
causes the loving pair many troubles and adventures, 



58 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



but their faithfulness is crowned at last, and is cele- 
brated in fairy- land by the reconciliation of Oberon 
and Titania. 

" Oberon " was immediately hailed on all sides as 
a masterpiece. Goethe writes to Lavater under the 
enthusiasm of a first impression : " So long as poetry 
is poetry, gold gold, and crystal crystal, ' Oberon ' will 
be loved and honored as a masterpiece of poetic art." 
Years afterward, in 1830, he judged more soberly: 
" The foundation was weak," he told Eckermann, 
" the plan had not been carefully elaborated before 
execution. . . . But the graceful, clever, and witty 
style of the great poet makes the book so agreeable to 
the reader that he thinks no more of the true foun- 
dation, but overlooks it as he reads." Even so stern 
a critic as Lessing was roused to unwonted expres- 
sions of admiration. And the verdict of 1780 has 
been but little modified in the century that has fol- 
lowed. " Oberon " is still reprinted, year by year, in 
countless editions, from the most gorgeous to the 
cheapest, and indeed is perhaps more widely read 
to-day than any other German epic, save Goethe's 
" Hermann und Dorothea." 

Wieland's later work showed nothing comparable 
to " Oberon," nor yet to the " Abderiten." For nearly 
a decade he printed nothing of importance. Nor can 
great value be attributed to the romance with which 
he broke silence at length, for " Peregrinus Proteus " 
was much inferior in verve to the earlier efforts in the 
same style. Here the cynical hero relates the stoiy 
of his voluntary suicide from religious enthusiasm, to 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 



50 



the sceptical Lucian, whom he meets in the land of 
the shades. Nor can " Aristipp," a romance in 
letters from the age of Pericles, claim a high place, 
whether for its imagination or its antiquarian research, 
though it contains an interesting characterization of 
Socrates. 

But in connection with these classical romances he 
was now brought to do work of less original but 
more permanent value to German culture. As in 
early life he had introduced Shakspere to the general 
German public, so now in his later years he did a 
service of quite peculiar worth in his translations of 
the Satires and Epistles of Horace, of the Letters of 
Cicero, and of the complete Dialogues of Lucian, a 
character so naturally sympathetic to him that, as we 
have seen, he introduced him into one of his later 
novels. He translated also portions of Xenophon, of 
Aristophanes, and Euripides. 

Beyond this work it may be said that during the 
last twenty-five years of his life he did little but 
watch, with an old man's benignant smile, the glori- 
ous flowering of German literature whose first budding 
he had himself tended. During the years 1794-1802 
he edited a complete edition of his works in forty-five 
volumes, very small after the use of the period, and 
up to 1809 he still had an active part in literary and 
critical journalism. He died the calm death of an 
Epicurean, in 1813. 

Wieland had been a student at Zurich when Les- 
sing, Germany's greatest literary reformer, began 
(1753) the remarkable career that is presently to 



60 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



occupy our atteution. Wieland was already widely 
read when Herder opened his fruitful series of critical 
studies. He had watched with sympathetic interest 
the whole ascending course of Schiller's genius, which 
untimely death had veiled from earthly eyes before 
it reached its zenith ; he had seen almost every phase 
of the philosophy of life reflected in the wide embrace 
of Goethe's giant mind ; he had been chosen to train 
the youth of the wisest and most munificent patron 
of German literature ; and he had the rare fortune to 
see with his own eyes the ripe fruit of the seed he 
had planted, while the ideas for whose acceptance 
he had fought in his critical journals had become the 
common inheritance of literary Germany. He had 
earned a right to a serene old age, with the honor, 
love, obedience, and troops of friends that should 
accompany it. The Czar made him a member of 
the Order of St. Anne ; Napoleon, of the Legion of 
Honor. 

To us Wieland's geniality will be his chief claim to 
our interested attention. Goethe was more versatile, 
and vastly greater, Schiller was more philosophical, 
Herder more serious, Lessing more critically profound, 
Heine more exquisitely fanciful. But perhaps none 
of them is a more delightful or recreative companion of 
our lighter moods than Christoph Martin Wieland. 

Though Wieland's lonsr life stretches more than 
thirty years beyond Lessing's (d. 1781), he belongs 
to an earlier literary period, and had but a small 
share in the results of the work of that great reformer. 
It is therefore fitting that he should precede him 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 



61 



here. With Herder the case is somewhat different, 
and it is rather the exigencies of literary proportion 
than any essential fitness that assigns him his place 
here, in order that nothing may distract attention on 
the path that is to lead us, through Lessing, to the 
heights of Schiller and Goethe and the Land of 
Promise beyond. 

Herder, born in 1744, was fifteen years the junior 
of Lessing, and five years older than Goethe, with 
whom he was more directly associated. Yet his es- 
sential affiliation was more with Lessing, so that 
parallels between them belong to the fascinating 
commonplaces of literary history ; they touch at so 
many points, and still they are radically contrasted 
in the bases of their natures. There is hardly a work 
of Herder that does not show the moulding influence 
of the elder critic, while yet there is not one among 
them that Lessing could, or would, have written. 
And on the other hand it is clear enough that while 
Herder admired, he never fathomed Lessing's spirit, 
for while there all shone in the clear white light of 
truth, Herder wrapped himself rather in the veils of 
mysticism. The one thought, the other felt, and so 
Herder is more eloquent, but Lessing is more con- 
vincing. Take a page from one of Lessing's essays 
and the whole suffers, for you have deprived it of an 
essential member. On the other hand, no writer 
lends himself more gracefully to citation, none is 
more persistently fragmentary up to the very close of 
his life than Herder. And so, too, in their judgment 
of society, Herder has the pastor's benevolent ap- 



62 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



preciation of all that he conceives to be good, while 
Lessing seems rather to quiver with bitter indigna- 
tion at falsity and sham, with that sceva indignatio 
of the English Swift, that led him, as Heine said, " to 
strike off many a skull in pure wantonness, and then 
mischievously to hold it up to the public to show 
that it was empty." 

It has been said that Herder holds the same rela- 
tion to Lessing that Schiller does to Goethe, and 
there is much to justify a comparison w 7 hich is } r et 
inadequate, as we shall see. Less happy is De 
Quincey's suggestion that Herder is the German 
Coleridge. He was something other than that; he 
was far less poetically creative, less original, yet he 
was more learned, with wider literary horizons, more 
industrious, less inaccurate ; but still he had the same 
indefiniteness and the same fulness which led them 
both to plan vastly more than they could possibly 
execute, so that the value of both to literature rests 
less in accomplishment than in suggestiveness. 

Herder was the son of a teacher in a girls' school 
in the little town of Mohringen. His mother was 
the daughter of an armorer, and the family were in 
narrow circumstances. The young Herder distin- 
guished himself at school, but it was less this than 
his frail health that saved him from industrial life 
and caused him to be apprenticed as copyist to 
Deacon Trescho, a voluminous but forgotten author. 
This laborious office did much to develop an easy 
style, and the free access to a generously furnished 
library was of great value to him, though he seems 



KLOPSTOCX, WIELAND, HERDER. 



63 



to have been neither well treated nor justly appre- 
ciated by his master. 

Already he was making a few ventures in inde- 
pendent composition, when he awakened the interest 
of a Prussian surgeon, and gladly availed himself of 
his suggestion to leave his task-master for Konigs- 
berg, where he hoped to have an operation performed 
on a weak eye and then to study medicine. But 
this latter design suffered sudden shipwreck. His 
nerves proved too weak, and he fainted at his only 
visit to the dissecting-room. 

Then he took a friend's advice and turned^ to 
theology. " Ignorant, simple, unknown as I was, 
without my parents' permission, and against the will 
of him to whom I had been intrusted, without money, 
and with prospects for only three weeks, I entered 
the academy." He obtained a small scholarship, 
however, and eked out a subsistence by teaching in a 
school where his pedagogic ability attracted warm 
commendation. 

Of vital importance to him was a close intimacy 
formed at this time with Kant, the famous meta- 
physician, a Konigsberg professor, who became, with 
Kousseau, the guide of Herder's philosophical specu- 
lations. The young candidate for orders was now 
beginning to gain distinction as a preacher, espe- 
cially of graceful funeral sermons ; and so, after 
two years at Konigsberg, a wider field was opened to 
his talents in the cathedral school at Riga, where for 
five years he was decidedly a popular favorite (1764— 
1769) with the church-going, public. 



64 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



That he did not stay longer in this congenial circle 
was due to his relations with that Klotz, whom Les- 
sing's critical scorn was soon to drive to his grave. 
In 1767 Herder had entered the critical arena in 
earnest with certain " Literary Fragments" which he 
himself called "supplements" to Lessing's " Literary 
Letters." Now Herder was distinctly, by nature and 
by profession, a man of peace, and he had announced 
his entrance into the fierce controversy with compli- 
mentary allusions to the autocrat of Halle, of whose 
character Lessing's life will reveal somewhat more. 
Klotz, as was his wont, returned him pound for 
pound, and smile for smile, in his "Acta Literaria," 
and then he waited for Herder to acknowledge the 
compliment with a second censer of adulation. But 
Herder presently tired of this pseudo-critical see-saw, 
and, what was worse, he had committed the unpar- 
donable sin in Klotz's eyes of praising the arch- 
adversary, Lessing. And so he was presently treated 
to a dish of very piquant personalities, quite in the 
style of modern journalism. At this poor Herder 
was frightened into a weak protest that he had not 
written certain articles in the series " Kritische 
Walder," which had begun to appear in 1769, and 
which the universal opinion, supported by conclusive 
circumstantial evidence, held to be from his pen. 
Thus Lessing saw himself abandoned, while Klotz 
pushed such an olive-branch aside with the contempt 
that it deserved. 

Herder was not made of stern stuff, and he re- 
solved to recruit both his health and his reputation 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 



65 



by a journey to the south of France. Doubtless he 
intended to return to Riga, where indeed he would 
still have been welcome ; but fate ordered it other- 
wise, and on his return to Germany, in November, 
1769, he accepted the post of tutor to the Prince of 
Holstein-Eutin. 

It was on the occasion of this return that he met 
LessiDg and his friends at Hamburg, and passed a so- 
cial fortnight with them. The critic, thus aroused, 
soon got the better of the pedagogue in his mind. 
His work with the prince did not suit him, and in 
fact he had neither the power nor the moral courage 
to resist the demoralizing influences that surrounded 
his charge., to whom it was probably intended, less 
than Herder should teach virtue, than that he should 
teach him to assume it. The course of their associated 
travels had brought them to Darmstadt. Here Herder 
met his future wife, Caroline Flachsland, and this 
new element in his life made him the more disposed 
to seek some permanent settlement. 

This excellent lady was quite after Herder's heart 
and in her account of their love, as well as in her 
letters, we may find valuable materials for eighteenth- 
century psychology. " In Klopstock and Kleist our 
souls found one another," she wrote, years afterward. 
Her letters are classical models of sentimental exag- 
geration, as we might expect if they were inspired 
from such a source. They seem made up in great 
part of the various possible combinations of the words 
"soul," "bliss," "indescribable," "holy," " melan- 
choly," " angel," " God," — all very gushing, a little 



66 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



mawkish, arid offering a very striking contrast to Eva 
Konig's nearly contemporary letters to Lessing. 

Full of this love, Herder gladly accepted a call to 
the pastorate of Biickeburg, but first he was obliged 
to undergo a tedious treatment of his eyes for several 
months in Strasburg. Yet this period of enforced 
rest proved beyond all expectation fruitful, for here 
he became intimate with Goethe, then a student at 
Strasburg, and in the influence that he exercised on 
the development of that supreme genius he earned 
his best claim to grateful memory. Goethe says 
that he found Herder at this time "irritable and im- 
patient," which the circumstances might explain and 
excuse, but yet it may not be unjust to recall the fact 
in view of their later relations. Throughout his life 
Herder shows rather a delicate moral nature than a 
strong character, though it is on the possession of the 
latter that he constantly dwells in his letters to his 
enthusiastic fiancee. 

Herder did not go to Biickeburg till 1771, and his 
delay caused him to be received rather coldy by the 
prince, a thorough man of the world, who cared more 
for social tact than for pulpit eloquence. He found 
little sympathy for his tender soul in court or peojue, 
and turned all the more eagerly to Caroline ; for, like 
many great preachers, he needed adulation to call out 
his best powers. He was not yet able to marry, how- 
ever, and seems to have found composition difficult 
during the suspense of his betrothal. Since Riga days 
he had written only a few critical notices, and a longer 
essay on the " Origin of Language " that had gained 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 



67 



a prize at the Berlin Academy, but he was gathering 
material for his " Philosophy of History," and for 
" The Oldest Document of the Human Race," and 
had already begun the studies in popular poetry that 
afterward made his chief title to literary fame. 

At length, iu 1773, he was married, and set up his 
household " with a few debts," as his wife tells us in 
her memoirs. This new relation naturally assisted 
his literary productivity, and the " Oldest Document 
of the Human Race " was now put on paper so rapidly 
that the first part could appear at Easter, 1774, to be 
followed by the second two years later. This work 
is an aesthetic treatment of the record of creation, 
and of Oriental imagery in general. Its somewhat 
nebulous theology involved him in bitter discussions, 
which he had not the controversial strength to sus- 
tain ; still, his work found a general recognition in 
literary circles, which would have made his position 
secure at Biickeburg, but yet he welcomed witli re- 
lief the call that came to him in 1776, through the 
mediation of Goethe, to the position of " General- 
superintendent " at Weimar, which had already be- 
come through Wielancl and Goethe, the centre of a 
new literary school in Germany. 

At Biickeburg he had corresponded with many of 
the literary lights of the time, he had seen Gleim 
often, and had offered Goethe condescending advice 
and literary counsel. Now he was in daily inter- 
course with Goethe, till that poet grew beyond him, 
with Wieland, always genial, and, as time went on, 
with most of the other men who, after Lessing, won 



68 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



distinction in German literature. There was no place 
so favorable to literary activity as Weimar, none 
where Herder could have done so much for others, 
none where he could have found an environment so 
favorable to his delicately organized genius. 

The new " General-superintendent " was received 
with mixed feelings. The orthodox and the pietists 
intrigued against him, but his eloquence made its 
way ; he was hindered in his reforms in Church and 
State, but he was in good measure repaid by the 
pleasures of social life at a court where Goethe led 
the company, aud all the diverse talents were inspired 
with equal ardor. 

And now Herder's great work begins in earnest. 
In 1778 he published philosophical and aesthetic es- 
says and a goodly part of his Popular Songs, " Stim- 
men der Volker." These he continued in 1779 and 
1780, together with theological and political studies. 
Distinctions and decorations now began to come to 
him both from Berlin and Munich. In 1782 he pub- 
lished a noteworthy study on " The Spirit of Hebrew 
Poetry," to be followed by still more theological and 
philosophical essa} r s. 

This period of his greatest activity was interrupted 
by a journey to Italy, in 1788. The classic ground 
charmed and fascinated him. His letters from 
Naples and Home are full of enthusiasm ; but Italy 
had no such deep influence on him as on Goethe, be- 
cause he was not so deep a man, and more narrowly 
German in his dread of classical clearness. 

The fourteen years of his life, after his return from 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 



69 



Italy were much occupied with routine work in vari- 
ous offices of the ducal church and schools. His 
publications, still numerous, were now mainly theo- 
logical or philological, and largely fragmentary. The 
natural sciences occupied him also. But the only 
work of these years that claims a literary interest to- 
day is his translation of the -Spanish romance of the 
Cid (1800), one of the last works of his facile pen. 
He died in 1803. 

Of Herder as a philosopher and as a philologist it is 
for others to speak. As a literary man he was more 
remarkable for the seed that he sowed than for the 
harvest that he reaped. His work was useful, but it 
lost its chief value when once it had been used. So 
he extended and corrected the aesthetics of Lessing, 
showing that the latter's canons required limitation, 
that his definitions excluded much of the best lyric 
verse from true poetry, that we should distinguish, 
not with Lessing's " Laokoon " between action and 
rest, but between " Das werdende," that which is de- 
veloping, becoming, and " Das gewordene," that which 
has attained a resting-point in its development. But 
his aesthetics were soon superseded in their turn by 
Schiller. So, too, he laid the foundations of the 
scientific history of culture and of the philosophy of 
history, but the structure soon hid the foundation, 
and his work in these fields has hardly more than 
an historical, one might almost say an antiquarian, 
interest. This is true also of his work in. compara- 
tive philology, and perhaps even of that in the 
comparative study of literatures, while its illustra- 



70 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



tions in the " Stimmen der Volker" have a permanent 
worth. 

So from a purely literary standpoint Herder must 
be ranked rather as a genial than as a great man. 
Clear in general conceptions, he was often hazy in 
details, and hence he will naturally he strongest -as 
an interpreter of others. In " Stimmen der Volker" 
he found exactly the field for his talent. Here he 
has gathered the popular songs of all nations, from 
Greenland to India. He has translated them with a 
skill and a sympathy that preserves in a wonderful 
degree the local color and feeling. The same delicate 
taste appears also in the application of his theory of 
popular poetry to the poetical books of the Bible, 
while the " Cid " is more important as a reflection of 
French and Spanish literature than for its original 
work. Both in lyric and in drama he had little crea- 
tive power, but he had remarkable poetic sympathy. 
So it was Herder's peculiar mission " to establish the 
connection of poetry with the intellectual life." 

But the limitations of his calling trammelled his de- 
velopment. He had great appreciation and love for 
the German language, and at the same time he had a 
deeper conception of the relation of language to hu- 
man nature and to national character than any other 
man of his day. This gave its value, in its time unique, 
to the " Spirit of Hebrew Poetry " and to the u Stim- 
men der Volker ; " for these were truly " characteristic 
poems from all nations, flowers of their spiritual life, 
pictures of their peculiar nature. . . . There were 
voices from Peru and Greenland, from Lapland and 



KLOPSTOCK, WIELAND, HERDER. 



71 



Estbonia. There might be heard the Letts and Lithu- 
anians, Wends and Serbs; Greece, Italy, Spain, and 
France gave of their treasures, nor was Ossian want- 
ing. The old Norse poetry, the mystic notes of the 
Edda, dreadful prophecies and bold heroic cries were 
heard anew. Danes, Scots, Englishmen, swelled the 
chorus. The German ' voices ' began with the 
' Ludwigslied ' and closed with the songs of Herder's 
own day. Ballads, romances, songs of love, of war, 
and of the dance, shepherd-songs, fables, lyrics of all 
kinds, were represented. But the different nation- 
alities were not divided. All humanity had equal 
rights, all nations stood on one plane before the 
critic, who marshalled their various "voices "only 
according to aesthetic principles, to related motives, 
and similarity of tone. With wonderful skill Herder 
was able to catch the distinctive note of each, to 
carry it through without wavering to the close, and 
to render the most entirely diverse moods, metres, 
and styles, in complete little works of art; And what 
a choice he offered ! This nosegay had been bound by 
a gardener, for whom all the nine muses had plucked 
the flowers. Never was a like effect attained by 
such means. Never has any one better understood 
manifold literary appropriation." 1 This is why 
Herder has sometimes been called " the great appro- 
priator," for the quality that gives his poetry its 
chief value is seen also in his scientific work. He 
was not a thorough thinker. He saw vast horizons, 
but he saw them dimly. He was more a seer than 
1 Freely translated from Scherer, 1. c. 477. 



72 



MODERN GEEMAN LITERATURE. 



a scholar. But be was a seer in many fields, and by 
suggesting their relations to one another he did more 
than he knew for modern science. 

Scherer has said that Herder's influence on Goethe 
" shows how much a clear-sighted critic of historic 
and theoretic culture is able to give to a clear-sighted 
poet who is eager to be taught." But this statement 
seems to call for some limitation. We shall see that 
the time of Herder's influence on Goethe is precisely 
the time when that great man is least distinguished 
for clearness of vision or independent precision of 
thought. It was the time of his restless youth. 
Passionate as are Goethe's professions of discipleship, 
great as was his admiration for Herder's eloquence, 
their natures held them asunder. Neither wholly 
comprehended the other. Herder's soul was like a 
star and dwelt apart ; but like the star, its brightness 
had always in it something of the night. Goethe 
loved the day, and never left the firm foothold of this 
earth. And yet, at a critical moment of his life, the 
broad-minded preacher was an essential factor in 
educating the brilliant and worldly youth to be one 
of the most complete men in whom nature has ever 
mirrored her perfect beauty. To have had such an 
influence on such a man will be Herder's best title to 
thankful memory. 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



73 



CHAPTER III. 

LESSING THE REFORMER. 

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born in 1729. 
He was thus four years the senior of Wieland, and 
like him, son of a country parson ; but he saw life 
from a sterner side than that charming epicurean, 
and while he was less fortunate, as the world counts 
fortune, he left a deeper impress on the artistic and 
literary life of Germany than Wieland, or indeed than 
any of his predecessors. The divergence between 
them began in their boyhood. Wieland grew up in 
an atmosphere of pietistic sentimentality; the Lu- 
theranism of the Lessing household was calm, matter- 
of-fact, sober. And in his development there is 
nothing of the vacillation of Wielancl's career, nor of 
Herder's incompleteness. It was a gradual outgrow- 
ing of the old bonds, every step forward and none 
back. 

The family of the Lessings had been distinguished 
in the civil and religious life of the Lausitz since the 
Reformation. But his father was in narrow circum- 
stances, narrowed still more by a growing family of 
twelve children, among whom Gotthold was the sec- 
,ond. He was a precocious boy, and already in his fifth 
year had asked that he might be painted with a great 



74 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



pile of books rather than with a bird-cage, as the 
painter had designed. It is said that his greatest 
childish pleasure was to turn the leaves of folios, 
"learning in play to use the tools of knowledge." 
He studied drawing, too, in these early years, and 
did not escape a touch of pedantry, as may be seen 
in some of his school letters from St. Afra's, at Meis- 
sen, whither he had gone at thirteen. 

His teachers reported Lessing as " a horse that 
needed double fodder." All was easy to him, and a 
royal decree permitted him to enter the university 
while his course was yet unfinished, for his masters 
declared " they could use him no longer." He brought 
to Leipzig a very thorough knowledge of Latin, which 
was the foundation of his literary life; but it does 
not appear that he showed as yet any remarkable 
precocity as a writer, and seventeen, his age at ma- 
triculation (1746), was about the average of the time, 
as it was also the age of Goethe's entrance at the 
same university. 

The freedom of student life stimulated his inde- 
pendent productivity. In 1748 he produced on the 
Leipzig stage a play which was indulgently received, 
and he had already printed a small volume of rather 
Anacreontic verse. It is plain, however, that he felt 
himself out of sympathy with the smug platitudes of 
the Leipzig school, and the inspiration-and-water of 
Klopstock. " I realized that books might make me 
learned, but would never make me a man," he wrote 
at this time ; so he " sought society in order to learn 
life. I left my study and ventured out among my 



LE3SING THE REFORMER. 



75 



fellows. What a contrast I discovered. Boorish 
bashfulness, ungainly clownishness, utter ignorance 
of social customs, were the qualities that distin- 
guished me." 

He resolved to make himself able to profit by the 
society that he now first learned to appreciate. He 
took lessons in dancing, fencing, riding, and went 
constantly to the theatres, translating French plays 
for the comedians in order to get free tickets to their 
performances, and thus obtaining an invaluable famil- 
iarity with the technique of the stage, such as no 
reading could ever have given him. It was this 
work that led to his original venture, "The Young- 
Scholar " (1748) ; but the applause that greeted it 
found no echo in the pastor's home, who " deplored 
the vile society of comedians and free-thinkers," into 
which he assumed his son had fallen. The father 
was mollified for a time by a sermon which Lessing 
composed, to show, as he said, " that he could become 
a preacher any day." However, it is significant that 
he now abandoned theology and entered his name as 
a student of medicine. 

But already he felt that literature was his field, 
and the iconoclast spirit stirred within him. He 
saw that reform meant struggle. He wished no 
toleration in the bloodless combats of aesthetics. 
Yet he was never extreme in his contentions, never 
aiming at more than seemed attainable or immedi- 
ately useful to his purpose. But a life of conflict is 
necessarily a restless one, and temperament as well 
as fortune made his doubly so. 



76 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Against the wishes of his father, and still more 
against those of his creditors, he left Leipzig and his 
fresh theatrical success, for Wittenberg (1748), and 
then for Berlin, which was, as it has remained, the 
centre of German free-thinking and worldly scepti- 
cism. Here he made his way by his pen, indepen- 
dently, though at first in dire poverty, lacking even 
decent clothing, and at last honorably but narrowly, 
writing literary criticisms of remarkable keenness, 
doing hack translation for publishers who paid for 
genius by the inch, and venturing occasionally on 
original dramas and lyrics, which can claim no great 
value. 

Meantime the spiritual atmosphere of Berlin had 
begun to eat away the armor of his Lutheran training. 
Already, in 1750, he met the great French sceptic, 
Voltaire, then a guest at Frederic's court, and sat, it 
is said, for some time as a daily guest at his table. 
Now, Voltaire was generally regarded, and perhaps 
with justice, as the greatest stylist of his time, and 
the eagerly receptive Lessing must have profited 
enormously from this proximity, in which he learned 
at length to dissect Voltaire with his own solvents 
and scalpels. But Voltaire was more than this. 
He was the declared enemy of the received form of 
Christianity, and to the Lausitz parson Lessing's loss 
seemed greater than his gain. 

Voltaire soon quarrelled with his disciple, as indeed 
he did with nearly every acquaintance in his long 
literary career. Here the ostensible cause was a sus- 
picion that Lessing had betrayed his literary confi- 



LESSING THE EEFORMER. 



77 



dence by showing a manuscript of the "Siecle de 
Louis XIV./' which had been intrusted to him for 
his private perusal. The merits of the case are not 
clear, and the trifling episode would certainly have 
been forgotten had it not been for the antagonists 
that Lessing afterward provoked. By them the in- 
sinuation was often revived during his life, and 
always with some effect. 

The general result of these Berlin years was good, 
■however. Independent he was sure to be from his 
nature ; but Berlin gave his life a wider horizon, and 
-his own influence on Berlin even in these early days, 
was noteworthy. He was the first to secure to Ger- 
many, says his biographer, Danzel, " due estimation 
for the vocation of the man of letters. Before him 
scholars wrote only for scholars. Lessing was the 
■first, who, though only twenty, felt the impulse to 
break through these barriers and address what lie had 
to say directly to the body of the nation." Berlin 
had been more under the influence of Zurich than 
any other German centre. Lessing helped to eman- 
cipate it, and gathered around him a group of earnest 
young men, chief among whom were Moses Mendels- 
sohn, a Jewish banker, and the bookseller Nicolai. 
By means of this following he obtained a strong po- 
sition in literary circles, so that, as early as 1755, 
there was a demand for a collected edition of his 
works. They contained nothing, however, that is 
now generally read or prized, save some songs of love 
and good-fellowship that still hold their place in 
student circles. Nut as though the " Fables " and 



78 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



" Epigrams " and the dramas of these volumes were 
not superior to any work of their time ; . but Lessing 
himself, by his own later superiority in these fields, 
has condemned his immaturity to oblivion. He was 
twenty-six when this honor of a collected edition 
came to him. Wieland was then twenty-two, and 
had done nothing of significance. Goethe was a boy 
of six, and Schiller was yet to be. 

In this year Lessing returned to Leipzig, appar- 
ently because of the greater theatrical advantages 
there ; for Berlin was far behind most German capi- 
tals, and was to have no permanent theatre till 1771. 
Soon after he undertook a journey to England, but 
the outbreak of the Seven Years' War called him 
back to share in the patriotic enthusiasm which 
for a time softened the asperities of literary contro- 
versy. In Leipzig, as in Berlin, Lessing became 
almost immediately the centre of a reforming circle, 
and so preserved here also his literary prestige and 
influence, which was of double importance at a time 
when the deeds of Frederic were giving a more pop- 
ular turn to lyric poetry than might have been other- 
wise attainable. For that Lessing was among the 
very first to see the golden opportunity, is clear from 
his preface to Gleim's " Songs of a Prussian Grena- 
dier," one of the most popular books of the entire 
century. 

That Gleim had roused the masses to an interest 
in literature, set Lessing immediately to consider 
whether other forms of imaginative expression that 
had once been genuinely popular could not be made 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



79 



available for the ends of the new national movement. 
It was thus that he came to interest himself in the 
legend of Dr. Faustus, which was afterward to be 
treated in so masterly a manner by Goethe. But the 
Seven Years' War was to attract him to more present 
themes, and it drew him also to other fields for his 
support. 

Berlin was the natural centre of the patriotic 
spirit, and to Berlin, accordingly, Lessing returned in 
the spring of 1758. Early in the next year he began 
the publication of the " Literary Letters," which were 
epoch-making in their plain, upright, and downright 
style, that called spades spades with refreshing frank- 
ness. He made special havoc among dilletante 
translators and the admirers of Gottsched's French 
tendencies, nor could the pietists of the school of 
Klopstock win aught but contempt for their odes, 
which, as he said, " were so full of feeling that the 
reader felt nothing." " Is it not blasphemous to 
supplicate God so for a woman ? " is his comment on 
Klopstock's love poetry. 

It is difficult to estimate to-day the importance of 
these " Literary Letters " on Germany. They cleared 
the air of false sentiment like a thunder shower. His 
deliberate aim was to foster the creation of a national 
literature, and this he furthered by fearless criticism in 
all literary fields. With these letters, under the star of 
Frederic and amid the glories of the Seven Years' 
War, modern German literature begins, as the older 
classical period had done, on distinctively national 
lines. This is the first German work that is generally 



80 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



read to-day. His critical severity set the lesser men 
in a truer light, while all who could comprehend 
profited by his teaching. It is with no exaggeration 
that Lessing has been called " the father of modern 
German criticism." 

The " Letters " appeared periodically, after the 
manner of " The Spectator," and were continued 
till 1765, with some irregularity, however, for in 
1760 Lessing had left Berlin for the seat of war to 
become the secretary of General Tauenzien at Breslau. 
He had been moved to accept the post partly for its 
own attractions, but more, as it seems, by social es- 
trangements, for he writes of it that " he wishes to 
spin himself into a cocoon for a time, to reappear 
again a bright butterfly." 

Amid the stirring scenes of the Silesian head- 
quarters, Lessing gathered material for the greatest 
work of aesthetic criticism and for the greatest comedy 
that Germany had yet seen, — for " Laokoon " and 
for " Minna von Barnhelm." Already, however, in 
" Miss Sara Sampson " he had produced a play that, 
in what it involved, was even more epoch-making for 
the German stage, for it brought into it a realistic 
psychology and the drama of common life. As Les- 
sing's biographer, Stahr, has said, " It was the egg of 
Columbus for German dramatic art. By introducing 
prose, and by basing this first great success of the 
German drama on the strongest feeling in German 
national life, the family relation, he directed the 
actor to the realistic expression of emotion." And of 
this same play Goethe says that in bringing forward 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



81 



the worth of the middle and lower social classes it 
heralded the French Revolution and the democratic 
era. But yet, whatever be the importance of " Miss 
Sara Sampson " in its relation to the art of its time, 
it is so vastly inferior to Lessing's later work, and so 
prejudiced by its foreign setting, that it is seldom 
read or acted to-day. 

" Minna von Barnhelm," on the other hand, was a 
truly national drama, its hero a Prussian soldier, like 
those of whom Gleim had sung, and the scene was 
Berlin, the time the present day. All traditional 
prejudices were sacrificed to realism. The very 
names of the characters were homely German, though 
the new dramatic school were then affecting English 
appellations, as their predecessors had adopted the 
classical names of the French stao-e. And not in 
name alone, but to the core of their natures they 
were individualized Germans, and Germans of 1767, 
drawn from the heart and the experience of the 
author, all genuine, worthy, national characters. 
"This incomparable work, where honor twines the 
garland of love," 1 was a tribute to German woman- 
hood, a glorification of the Prussian army, a homage 
to the great king. 

So " Minna " is essentially naturalistic, and as 
much so in language as in conception. It is perfectly 
true that in declaring his independence of French 
models he realized a suggestion of Diderot, who had 
pointed to the possible dramatic elements in common 

1 Stahr, Lebon Lessings. The whole paragraph is, however, 
more largely indebted to Scherer, 1. c. 448. 

6 



82 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



life ; but while Diderot was essentially pathetic, Les- 
sing appealed rather to the sterling homely virtues of 
the German heart, and so was more genuinely natural. 
But more than this, it was, as Goethe said, " the first 
product of the German mind that had local, contem- 
porary interest, and so it wielded an immense influ- 
ence." " In the obscure times in which it first 
appeared, it seemed a brilliant meteor," 1 and served 
Goethe as a model for his youthful dramatic essays. 
These realistic studies, the mean truckling host, the 
honest coarse Just, the amiable enthusiastic Werner, 
the lively mercurial Franciska, have kept their dis- 
tinct literary individuality to this day. 

In its political aspect " Minna " was an olive- 
branch stretched out from victorious Prussia to the 
Saxons, smarting under defeat and full of jealous and 
suspicious hatred. And it had the marvellous for- 
tune to please both sides, to be received with enthu- 
siasm at Berlin and at Leipzig. It is melancholy to 
reflect, however, that honor was all the return that 
the needy author of the best of German comedies 
received for his labors. 

Thus the German stage was nationalized, and 
opened to modern realism. And immediately the 
fiction of the period reflects this in its increasing 
naturalism, though here the gain was more than lost 
in the romantic reaction of the next generation. But 
in every field of literature the effect of " Minna " 
could not but be sound and health-giving. And 

1 Eckermann, Gesprache, March 27, 1831. On Feb. 27, 1827, lie 
had expressed himself more critically. 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



83 



what "Minna" taught by example, the "Laokoon" 
was to teach by precept. 

The basis of this aesthetic study is a critical attempt 
to define the limits of poetry and painting. It had 
been suggested by a passage in which the great anti- 
quarian Winkelmann had contrasted the statue of 
Laokoon with Virgil's description of his death, and 
had concluded thence the inferiority of poetry to 
plastic art. It was characteristic of Lessing that he 
should choose as his adversary the man whom he, 
with all Germany, regarded as a master, for he felt he 
had a right to measure himself with the greatest ; but 
it is curious to note that he began the composition of 
his study in Trench, — so poor an outlook had his 
native tongue a generation before the period of its 
greatest glory. 

To Lessing it seemed fundamentally false to re- 
gard the divergence of poets and painters as errors on 
either side. He would investigate the characteristic 
differences of both, to see if from them laws peculiar 
to each might not be deduced which would often com- 
pel them to take quite different paths. He found 
that poetr}' could imitate objects only by suggestion ; 
hence descriptive verse, such as that of Thomson's 
" Seasons," seemed to him radically wrong. Poetry 
deals with action, plastic art with situations, and 
hence the range of poetry is wider, and in it inven- 
tion has a grander scope. Sculpture must suggest 
motion by bodily forms ; poetry must suggest bodily 
forms by their actions, and it follows from this that 
while sculpture should be confined to the beautiful, 



84 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



poetry in its revelations of the whole moral world, 
may include the ugly and the terrible, as incarnations 
of the evil that forms an inevitable part of it. 

This is in brief the thesis of the " Laokoon." Only 
a third of it was completed ; but, torso as it is, it 
revolutionized literary taste, and what before had 
been denied became " the A B C of criticism." " One 
must be young,'' says Goethe, "to conceive what 
an influence ' Laokoon ' had on us, taking us from 
the realm of dreary contemplation to the free fields of 
thought. That long misunderstood phrase, ut pictura 
poesis, was immediately set aside. The distinction of 
the speaking and plastic arts was clear. All the 
results of this glorious thought were revealed to us 
as by a lightning flash." Herder, too, and Wieland 
w T ere cordial in their admiration, and quick to learn 
from the new light. 

The publication of " Laokoon " had been hastened 
by the hope that Lessing might win by it the post of 
Eoyal Librarian at Berlin ; but this office was be- 
stowed on a grotesquely incompetent Frenchman, for 
Frederic's mind had been poisoned against Lessing 
by the slanders of Voltaire. Throughout his life, 
hitherto, fortune had never smiled brightly on him, 
but he felt this stroke bitterly. He had resigned his 
position at Breslau. Berlin had become hateful to 
him, " waiting," as he bitterly said, " in the market- 
place, while no one would hire him," — him the 
greatest critic and the greatest dramatist Germany 
had yet known, a man who must have felt that he 
would have been of all Germans the most after 



LESSING THE EEFORMER. 



85 



Frederic's royal heart, and whom Frederic was never 
to know. To this fatality we owe it that the 
" Laokoon " was never finished. It was left to 
Schiller and to Kant to endeavor to complete a work 
of which Lessing had said to Nicolai that not even 
Herder dreamed what he was really aiming at. But 
though the critical artist and the artistic critic might 
under better auspices have done more for German 
literature, what he had done for the rising generation 
was already inestimable. 

While he was " standing in the market-place " 
Lessing received a call to Hamburg from the directors 
of a new theatre there, whose public-spirited citizens 
proposed to establish a national stage that should 
lead and form the dramatic taste of Germany. These 
men sought Lessing's co-operation as their dramaturgic 
critic and adviser. This post was peculiarly con- 
genial to him, but he was first obliged to sell his 
library, which he had accumulated with much loving 
care, to pay his debts and rent. From the first he 
he had been devoted to the stage, and even now de- 
clined a better paying post in Cassel that he might 
labor for its elevation. For, as Devrient, the histo- 
rian of the German theatre, has said, Lessing " made 
nothing so completely his life's mission as the un- 
tiring endeavor to revive the national drama." In 
April, 1767, he left Berlin. He was now thirty- 
eight years old. 

The theatrical enterprise speedily collapsed ; but 
Lessing's connection with it has given it an enduring- 
name. Beginning in May, he published twice a week 



86 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



those letters on theatrical criticism that go under 
the name of the " Hamburg Dramaturgy." These 
were continued, though with some irregularity, till 
1769, and came more and more to he essays on 
dramatic art, showing little, and at last no connection 
with their original cause. Lessing regarded the 
drama as the highest form of art, uniting, as it seemed 
to him, the advantages of the plastic arts and of 
poetry. In this sense the "Dramaturgy" may be 
regarded as a continuation of the " Laokoon." He 
bases his critical canons on Aristotle, whom he so 
explains that Sophocles and Shakspere can become 
his models, while he draws from the French trage- 
dians, Corneille, Eacine, and especially Voltaire, his 
examples of the distortion of the Aristotelian rules. 

The " Dramaturgy " from that day to this has 
been the vade mecwm of the German stage. " For the 
depth of its knowledge, the healthiness of its wit, its 
energy of character and purity of taste," it was, as 
Ger vinus has said, " the inward joy and just pride of 
every German." These letters gave the death-blow 
to the French school in Germany, though indeed the 
dramatists that followed, in the period of "storm and 
stress," went rapidly to the other extreme, rebelling 
against all rule, as Lessing himself had predicted that 
they would do. But when the swaying needle came 
to rest in the classical period of Schiller and Goethe, 
it pointed to his standard, and Lessing has ever since 
asserted an undisputed authority. 

At first he had addressed himself to the funda- 
mental principles of acting, exalting the art far be- 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



87 



yond the place then claimed for it. The actor, he 
said, must " think everywhere with the poet, or, 
where he is at fault, he must think for him." He is 
to have in him something of the sculptor, the painter, 
and the poet, and Lessing even begins to elaborate 
for him a " philosophy of gesticulation." But actors 
are proverbially sensitive to criticism, and he was 
soon constrained to turn his pen to more general 
discussions. 

The German dramatists of his time were essentially 
imitators. He brushed these aside to direct his at- 
tack on the source of the evil, on Corneille, on Eacine, 
and on Voltaire, whose personal character he had, as 
we know, good reason to despise. They had pre- 
tended to be followers of Aristotle. He showed that 
they followed only their own misconceptions. The 
result of his work was that aesthetic canons that had 
ruled Europe with an iron rod since more than a 
century were banished forever to the limbo of the 
past, while all eyes were turned to Shakspere, and 
some few to Calderon, who now for the first time 
became known in Germany. 

But Lessing uttered no wholesale condemnation. 
He recognized the poetic worth of Corneille, he gave 
Moliere a place beside Shakspere as a master of 
comedy, a place grudged him by his own countrymen, 
Voltaire and Eousseau. Indeed, the whole tone of 
the " Dramaturgy " is essentially conservative. Les- 
sing was, says Schiller in a letter to Goethe, written 
in 1799, "the clearest as well as the most liberal 
thinker on art, and the one who kept most constantly 



88 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



before him its necessary conditions. As one reads 
him one might almost believe that the golden age 
of German taste is already past, for how few recent 
judgments concerning art deserve a place beside 
his." 

The National Theatre at Hamburg had yielded to 
philistinism and the Hamburg clergy, but Lessing 
would have continued the "Dramaturgy" had not 
pirated editions taken away all hope of remuneration 
for a work that " marked one of the most cheering 
periods in the evolution of the German drama." 
" The reprint," he said, " is the only cause why the 
publication has been delayed and is now suspended." 
But as his " Dramaturgy " was drawing to its enforced 
close, Lessing's attention was attracted to antiquarian 
studies by the persistent and ill-natured attacks of 
Klotz, a professor at Halle, who by dint of assurance 
had imposed his shallow pretensions to critical knowl- 
edge on the literary world, where for a time he 
seemed to attain a certain distinction. Lessing had 
criticised some of his Latin trifles, and the offended 
professor had begun a relentless war on him in the 
journal, which he maintained as a sort of literary 
bludgeon ; for Klotz did not hesitate at misrepre- 
sentation or personal slander of all who would not 
recognize his supremacy. 

We have seen how he frightened Herder into flight. 
Lessing was made of different stuff. He took up 
again the sword of the " Literary Letters," that had 
lost none of its keenness, and "openly declared war on 
Klotz." This latter at first had almost all the public 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



89 



on his side ; for, as Lessing said, " be had scolded 
many and coaxed more " to submit to his dictation. 
But Lessing's blows were as crushing in their weight 
as they were marvellous in their rapidity and terrible 
in their withering contempt. " I should, be sorry," 
he says, " to have this investigation of mine estimated 
by its origin. For what called it forth is so con- 
temptible that only my manner of using it is my 
excuse for using it at all." Yet once in the field he 
acted on the principle that mercy must follow victory. 
He had promised to bring Klotz completely to the 
ground. In twenty-eight days he completed twenty- 
four of these " Antiquarian Letters," and before the 
end of the second month his pamphlets formed a 
volume. The work was thorough. Klotz stood con- 
victed before all men, not only of ignorance and 
superficiality, but of dishonesty and malice. All 
literary Germany breathed freer to be rid of the 
incubus that they had allowed to impose itself on 
them. 

Professor Eeiske, in an unguarded moment, congrat- 
ulated Lessing on having clone what he would have 
done himself if he had not shrunk from soiling his 
hands with such ignoble blood. To him the critic 
replied with fine irony : " I waited long to see if some 
one would not go forth to meet the Goliath of the 
learned Philistines. At last I could endure his 
stupid derision no longer, without hurling a few stones 
at him from my wallet." Presently he changes the 
simile to one from his favorite Don Quixote: "I am 
only a mill, not a giant. , . , Midges may swarm be- 



90 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



tween and about my sails, but wanton boys must not 
seek to run through. . . . Whoever is hurled into 
the air by my arms has only himself to blame, and I 
cannot let him down more gently than he falls." 
And in the same spirit he says again : " If I were to 
trust myself to turn critic my scale would be : Mild 
and flattering to the beginner, doubtful and yet ad- 
miring to the master, terrible and strict to the bungler, 
derisive to the braggart, and as bitter as I was able 
to the partisan." His contempt for Klotz is equalled 
only by his indignation for those who had " permitted 
him to carp and criticise unhissed." For he was left 
to carry on the battle single-handed, " fighting a nest 
of hornets," as Herder said. And so the honor of 
emancipating German literature from its false stan- 
dards is his alone. But here, as always, he was more 
fitted to crush than to convert. As Goethe said, 
" he was the highest intellect, and only the highest 
could learn from him. He was dangerous to half 
intelligence." 1 

In the main, these fifty-seven letters can now have 
only a minor interest; but toward the close of the 
controversy there appeared a pamphlet, "How the 
Ancients represented Death," which has a higher im- 
portance for the history of aesthetics, since it ban- 
ished the skeleton and hour-glass from German 
art. In their place appeared the genius with the 
inverted torch ; for, as Lessiug rightly said, " Only a 
misapprehended religion can separate us' from the 
beautiful. That religion will be true and rightly 
1 Eckermann, Gesprache, Jan. 18, 1825. 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



91 



apprehended that brings us back to the true and 
beautiful everywhere." 

The controversy killed Klotz's reputation and pos- 
sibly hastened his end, for he died in 1772. Of this, 
Lessing's friend, Eva Konig, wrote to him : " I was 
glad to think that you may have contributed greatly 
to his salvation, since you probably brought him to 
comprehend himself." Klotz's biographer, Von Murr, 
says deprecatingly, " He threw a pea at Lessing and 
was answered by an avalanche of stones." The 
critic's resources were by no means exhausted, how- 
ever, and his posthumous papers showed as damaging 
criticism of Klotz as anything that he printed in his 
lifetime. 

Meantime, however, Lessing had left Hamburg, 
famous but poor, for neither " Minna " nor the 
" Dramaturgy " had brought him money, thanks to 
legalized piracy. He would have gone to Italy ; but 
he found that the sale of all that he possessed would 
not furnish the smallest sum that seemed necessary. 
He was still cherishing this scheme when there came 
to him from Brunswick an offer of the position of 
Court Librarian at Wolfenbuttel. He accepted this 
post with the more eagerness since love had at length 
crossed his path, and this made it seem quite neces- 
sary for him to found a home even at some sacrifice 
of literary environment. 

Lessing is perhaps the only one of the great writers 
of this time who first felt the strong passion of love 
in middle life. He seems to have had few or no sopho- 
moric attachments, and this belated passion, so deep, 



92 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

so strong, and so tragic, was in all ways worthy of 
his noble soul. Eva Konig, widow of a silk manu- 
facturer of Hamburg, was Lessing's chosen love when 
he accepted the call to Wolfenbiittel, and they were 
formally, though secretly, betrothed soon after he 
began his work there. But she had tangled business 
complications to unravel, and the interests of her 
children to consider, so that their marriage was de- 
ferred for five years from their betrothal (1771-1776). 
This period of trial and separation produced the most 
remarkable series of letters of love that Germany has 
to show. There is a dignity, a self-restraint, an all- 
pervading purity of thought, that exalts the relation 
on both sides, while both man and woman preserve 
the noblest traits of their sex. 

But we who know the tragic end of the I0112 
struggle cannot read the story of these strong hearts 
without melancholy. That he might be ready for his 
wife when she could come to him, Lessing buried 
himself for these five years far from the influences 
that would have favored his genius, and for this he 
endured the humiliations of patronage from a petty 
and faithless prince. It is touching to see how he 
clings to the nest he has built for her, even though 
Eva, with the magnanimous courage of Tellheim in 
his own comedy, bade him order his life with no 
thought for her. Neither was young, and under the 
strain of these years both grew old in body, though 
still fresh at heart. 

A gleam of sunshine pierces the clouds when, in 
1775, Lessing breaks away from Wolfenbiittel to visit 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



93 



his beloved, whom business ties held in Vienna. But 
even here the irony of late pursues him. He is still 
dependent ; old Hamburg creditors and the insatiable 
demands of his relatives have forced him to over- 
draw his salary ever since he first took service with 
the Duke of Brunswick. He is no longer the free 
" sparrow on the house-top " of which he loved to speak, 
no longer the free man, and when, after ten happy days 
with his betrothed, the duke's son requests him to fol- 
low him to Italy, just as lie is arranging for the mar- 
riage that now first seems possible, the beautiful vision 
fades, and he must go, though he leave his heart be- 
hind. Small comfort to him that he had been feted 
and applauded at Vienna, in theatre and at court, as 
no German author had ever been. He was an appurte- 
nance of Wulfenbuttel. Small comfort to him, bitter 
irony rather, that the Italy he had so often longed 
to see should be granted to him, at last, at the one 
moment of his life when it was an unwelcome boon. 

And now while his bride is waiting for him, as he 
had waited so long for her, he must wander aimlessly 
over the land he would have studied, must see his 
fruitless stay prolonged for weeks and months, must 
suffer agony from lpst letters, till his puzzled mind 
is shaken, and all the while he must smile on 
courtiers, and pay his court to princes. He found 
himself indeed not without honor in this old home of 
the arts. His fame had preceded him ; some of his 
works had been translated into Italian, and at Borne 
the friends of the great Winkelmann were his also. 
Yet he could not but be restless in this Promised 



94 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Land, and none rejoiced more than he at the peremp- 
tory order that recalled the prince to Brunswick, 
whither Lessing returned on the 23d of February, 
1776. Soon after he was married to " the only woman 
with whom he would trust himself to live," as he 
said ; and now at last he might hope to end his 
storm-tossed life in humble happiness. How gra- 
ciously fate smiled on him will appear presently. 
We must first consider the literary harvest of these 
thirsty years. 

Great things could hardly come from a mind in 
suspense and from Wolfenbiittel ; and so, save for 
"Emilia Galotti," which had been projected and 
partly completed long before, this period offers little 
that is comparable with the " Literary " or the " An- 
tiquarian Letters," still less with " Laokoon " or with 
"Minna." He knew this as well as any one. In 
letters of the time he says : " I believe the most 
wretched man is he who must labor with his head, 
even when he is not sure that he has a head." " God 
know r s it has never been more necessary for me to 
write for money than now. I cannot busy myself 
now with anything that requires mental effort or 
elasticity. I must bore where the board is thinnest. 
When I am less tortured from without I will take 
the thick end in hand again." " I have here," he 
says, " only such books as sooner or later kill the 
intellect as well as time. If one stops thinking long, 
at last one cannot think." What were these books 
that were killing Lessing's mental elasticity in the 
library at Wolfenbiittel? 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



95 



On assuming his post, Lessing Lad said that he 
" would not have the name of librarian for nothing." 
His " Contributions to Literature and History from 
the Ducal Library at Wolfenbuttel" were to prove 
that a critical scholar could make even these dead 
bones live. Already in other libraries he had shown 
a wonderful tact in tracing clews to rare and curious 
books. The very first day of his official life as libra- 
rian revealed to him a long lost work of mediaeval 
theology, the defence of Berengar of Tours from an 
accusation of heresy on the Eucharist, which had been 
made by Lanfranc the famous Archbishop of Canter- 
bury. It is not necessary to enter here into the 
views of this noted Protestant of the eleventh cen- 
tury. The document was, however, of great intrinsic 
interest, though it was most attractive to Lessing 
because it cleared a sympathetic character from the 
accusation of paltering with truth, an act that above 
all others was hateful to him. It was in this con- 
nection that Lessing uttered the memorable words : 
" The man who is faithless to truth in threatening 
danger may yet love her much, and truth will forgive 
his infidelity because he loves her. But whoever 
thinks to prostitute truth under masks and rouge, he 
may be her pimp, he has never been her lover." 

The defence of Berengar, though annoying to the 
Eoman Catholics, was agreeable to the Lutherans. 
But his next discovery antagonized these also. He 
detailed the pitiful fate of Neuser, a Lutheran clergy- 
man, whom foes of his own theological household had 
exiled to the broader hospitality of Mohammedan 



96 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Constantinople. Other fruits o^ his librarian's ac- 
tivity may be passed over, but these have a double 
interest as the prelude to the great controversy with 
Lutheran orthodoxy that was to cloud, and yet irradi- 
ate, the closing years of his life, the years of the 
" Anti-Goeze " and " Nathan the Wise." 

Meantime, however, Lessing had given to Germany 
its most perfect, if not its greatest tragedy, " Emilia 
Galotti," which was the embodiment of all that the 
" Dramaturgy " had taught. He had had this play 
in hand since 1758, and in 1768 it was nearly finished 
when the collapse of the Hamburg " National Theatre " 
made him lay it aside once more. As " Minna " is the 
oldest comedy that holds the German stage to-day, so 
this is the oldest tragedy. As Goethe beautifully 
said : " It rose in Grecian majesty like the sacred isle 
of Delos, out of the deluge of Gottsched, Weisse, and 
Gellert, that it might mercifully receive the goddess 
in her travail." Later his admiration was somewhat 
more qualified. He became a little doubtful, as 
others have been also, whether there was aesthetic 
justification for the climax of the tragedy. 

" Emilia Galotti " is the Roman " Virginia," a 
daughter killed by her father to save her imperilled 
honor, but she is " a bourgeois Virginia " in modern 
garb, and quite without the political relations of 
Livy's story. But the drama is none the less politi- 
cal. Lessing's description of the petty court of a 
vicious princeling was felt to contain such elements 
of truth readily applicable to German Residenzen that 
more than one galled jade winced, and the court of 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



97 



Gotha actually forbade the representation. The 
Brunswick authorities were more sane, though not 
less guilty, yet we can but feel with Caroline Herder 
that " it took a brave man to present that piece at 
that court." For indeed it held the mirror up to the 
most wretched time of German division, a time that 
is branded by the sale of the Hessians to England, of 
slaves at home to crush liberty abroad. That the 
scene was laid in Italy did not make the application 
less obvious, and though Lessing had made his satire 
so general that it could be referred to no one German 
court, it cannot but appear to the reader to-day as a 
prelude, and in some degree as a palliation, for the 
great Eevolution that followed hard upon it. 

This political effect is much heightened by the fact 
that Lessing is truer to nature and to justice as he 
found them than to ideal nature and poetic justice. 
When Emilia had found her only safety in death, 
while neither the weak sentimental prince nor his 
wicked counsellor feared any avenger of their crime, 
the auditors could not but realize that it was under 
these conditions that they themselves lived, and per- 
haps they might be roused by the fearful diagnosis 
of the social disease to look to themselves for the 
remedy. Goethe was right to call such a tragedy 
" full of understanding, wisdom, insight into the world, 
of an immense culture, beside which we now (1812) 
are already becoming barbarians." This " we " is ad- 
dressed to men such as Schlegel, who could find in 
" Emilia " only " a good example of dramatic algebra, a 
piece of pure reason, brought forth in sweat and pain, 

7 



98 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



at which we wonder shivering, and shiver as we 
wonder." 

Schiller found " Emilia," as he did all of Lessinq-'s 
dramas, too relentlessly simple for his taste. To 
him, as to Goethe, the logic seemed too severe ; but 
the best of later critics, among them Gervinus and 
Stahr, justify the catastrophe. It has been most ad- 
mirably defended also by Kuno Fischer, whose bril- 
liant analysis of the pyschological elements in the 
characters of this play is a masterpiece of philosophi- 
cal criticism. 1 " Piety and obedience " seem to Fischer 
the virtues that make Emilia " so timid and so de- 
cided, so weak and so strong in will ; so weak that 
she never controls her first impressions and does not 
feel that she has strength for a slight resistance, so 
strong that she needs not to seek but already pos- 
sesses in herself strength for the last and uttermost 
resistance, the strength to die." This child, that at 
first has no other will than her mother's, is thus at 
last able to move and to subject to her will the will 
of her father, so much stronger than her own, because 
no power can induce her to return to a world whose 
enticements she has once experienced, whose inmost 
rottenness she has fully recognized. And as Fischer 
concludes, " Is not this a tragedy to shake the very 
soul ? " No wonder, then, that, as Devrient, himself an 
actor, observes, " In every role of ' Emilia Galotti ' the 
player's art never comes to an end ; " for, as Eckhof, 
another historian of the drama, says. " When the 
author dives into the sea of human thought and 

1 Lessing als Reformator, i. 247 seq. 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



99 



passion the actor must dive after him, until he find 
him." 

But though the catastrophe is to be fully justified, it 
does not at first seem so to-day ; and the reason of this 
is that, by the very influence of Lessing and such as 
he, Germany has been delivered from the conditions 
that are here weighed in the balance. It is noteworthy 
that the doubting voices are all raised after the Eevo- 
lutionary thunder has cleared the air, for the contem- 
porary adverse criticism, partly the result of personal 
spite, was petty in the extreme. 

" Emilia Galotti " closes Lessing's work as a re- 
former of the German drama ; for " Nathan der Weise," 
though still presented on the stage, is to be regarded 
rather as a philosophical work in dramatic form, the 
key-stone of the arch that unites his ethical studies 
to those theological controversies that were to fill his 
later years. But before entering on this last phase 
of his labor for the emancipation of Germany the 
story of his life shall be carried through the brief 
sunshine of his marriage to the great sorrow of his 
wife's early death. 

No year of Lessing's life was brighter than that 
which followed his long deferred marriage with Eva 
Konig. Each word that is preserved from the year 
1777 adds a new detail to the picture of their happy 
home. A promised pension and what had been re- 
covered of his wife's estate seemed to secure him for 
the first time from care for his daily bread. The 
stimulus of his new relation, the friends who came 
to his hospitable board, the hopes that their union 



100 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

would not lack its crowning blessing, all combined to 
give his mind new strength and elasticity. One of 
his guests, the young Spittler, writes : " These were 
three of the happiest and most instructive weeks of 
my life. ... I do not know if you are acquainted 
with Lessing personally. I can assure you he is the 
greatest friend of man, the most active promoter of 
all learning, the most helpful and affectionate patron. 
A visitor becomes so intimate with him that uncon- 
sciously he will almost forget with what a great man 
he has to do." And he was pathetically anxious that 
all who loved him should sympathize with his new 
happiness. He invites once and again his brother 
and his Berlin friends to visit him. But it is fit- 
ting that the story of his joy should be brief. On 
Christmas eve, 1777, his wife bore him a son, who 
died on Christmas day. The mother lingered till the 
10th of January, only to follow her child. 

Lessing' s letters during this terrible fortnight of 
bereavement and heart-rending anxiety are among 
the classics of pain. "I seize," he writes to a friend, 
" a moment when my wife is lying senseless to thank 
you for your kind sympathy. My joy was only short, 
and I was so sorry to lose him, this son, for he had so 
much sense, so much sense. Do not think that my 
few hours of fatherhood have made me already such 
an ape of a father. I know what I say. Did it not 
show his sense that they had to pull him into the 
world with forceps, and that he became so soon dis- 
gusted with his new abode. Was he not wise in 
seizing the first chance to leave it again ? To be 



LESSING THE EEFORMER. 



101 



sure, the hasty fellow drags his mother away with 
him, too, for there is little hope left that I shall save 
her. I wished, for once, to be happy like other men, 
but it has succeeded ill with me." And again after 
the final catastrophe, he writes: "My wife is dead. 
I am glad there cannot be many more such trials left 
for me to go through, and am wholly calm." Here 
the irony is appalling. A few days later he says : 
" I must begin again to totter on my way alone ; " 
and he breaks out in the repeated cry : " If you had 
only known her ! If you had only known her ! I fear 
you will never see me again as our friend Moses 
(Mendelssohn) found me, so quiet, so contented within 
my four walls." Again he writes : " I am too proud 
to acknowledge myself unhappy, — only set the teeth 
and let the boat drift at the mercy of winds and 
waves. Enough that I will not upset it myself." 
And so. he set to work again with sad courage, and in 
three years of intense controversial activity, crowned 
with the great eirenicon, " Nathan the Wise," he 
brought to a dignified close a life that was itself his 
greatest tragedy. The immediate cause of this last 
and most serious controversy were some posthumous 
essays of Eeimarus, a free-thinker of Hamburg and 
friend of Lessing, who edited his papers. It did not 
follow that Lessing was himself a free-thinker, or dis- 
posed to agree with his dead friend. But lie believed 
with his whole soul, like every consistent Protestant, 
in freedom of discussion. At first, so far as he took 
personal part in the debate that these essays caused, 
he stood on the plane of Lutheran orthodoxy, which 



102 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



he undertook to reconcile with what is called the 
" higher criticism " of the Scriptures by his theory of 
the " Education of the Human Kace," or, as we might 
say, of the " development of doctrine." " The letter 
is not the spirit and the Bible is not religion," he 
said, and here we have the essence of a position 
that he was the first to assert in Germany, though 
perhaps he did not wholly discern the necessary re- 
sults of a doctrine, which indeed our own generation 
is just beginning to perceive. 

" Christianity moves on its calm, eternal course. 
Eclipses do not draw the planets from their orbits. 
But the sects of Christianity are its phases, which 
can be preserved only by a pause in all nature, so 
that sun, planet, and observer shall remain at the 
same point. God preserve us from such a fearful 
pause." Thus, according to Lessing, we do not yet 
know the capabilities of our religion. To him, in his 
essentially Protestant nature, Christianity is not his- 
torical, it is not the faith once delivered to the saints, 
it is a philosophy of life, and essentially personal. So 
it has been said that his religion " rests in feeling, 
and reveals itself in love." He himself said : " To 
base the truth of religion on the historical probability 
of miracles is to hang eternity on a spiders web." 
He found, as we have seen, a surer note of true re- 
ligion in its power " to bring us back everywhere to 
the beautiful." 

It is not the province of the literary essayist to re- 
vive a forgotten, much less to fan an existing, theo- 
logical controversy ; but it is essential to bear these 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



103 



utterances of Lessing in mind if one is to understand 
the significance of his last years. It is not the ques- 
tion here what part of truth he saw or failed to see, 
but rather to show what position he took as an inde- 
pendent seeker for truth, — a man who said, and 
thought, that it was better error should be taught 
than that free speech should be stifled. 

Eeimarus' " Fragments " called in question the 
historical bases of Christianity, and the controversy 
over them raged thick and fast throughout Germany. 
The leader of the obscurantists was Goeze, a Lutheran 
pastor of Hamburg, a man whom Lessing esteemed 
personally, as appears from his diary. And he led a 
numerous band, while at first almost the sole defender 
of free discussion was Lessing. Once more it is well 
to state that there was no controversy about particu- 
lar dogmas. On one side was a stalwart zeal for 
truth that feared no new light, on the other was 
narrow Lutheran orthodoxy, so sure of truth as to 
dare to stifle thought. The issue cannot be stated 
better than in Lessing' s own words : " The worth of a 
man," he says, " lies not in the truth that he pos- 
sesses or believes that he possesses, but in the honest 
endeavor that he puts forth to secure that truth ; 
for not in the possession of, but by the search for 
truth, are a man's powers enlarged, and it is in this 
alone that his ever-growing perfection consists. Pos- 
session fosters content, indolence, pride. If God had 
in his right hand all truth, and in his left only the 
ever-active impulse after truth, though with the con- 
dition of constant erring, I would humbly turn to the 



104 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



left hand and say : Father, give me this. Pure truth 
is for thee alone." 

Now between such a position and the self-consti- 
tuted Hamburg pope there was no truce possible, and 
Goeze exerted the whole force of his practised vitu- 
peration in his very first attack, while the German 
language has probably never attained a higher pitch 
of eloquent indignation than in Lessing's famous " Ab- 
sagungsbrief," a challenge to his opponent, in which 
he promises never to yield so long as he can hold 
a pen. 

Nobly he kept his promise. The pamphlets of his 
opponents have found their place to-day in what 
Lowell has aptly called the " herbarium of Billings- 
gate ; " but his letters will long continue to be read 
for their lofty eloquence, their biting wit, and their 
dramatic vivacity. They mark a distinct advance in 
German prose style, already so much indebted to 
Lessing that he might be called its re-creator. And 
they mark also a permanent gain in the religious life 
of Germany, a gain that few have since been bold 
enough to assail. The pamphlet war came at last to 
a sudden end. Goeze had confidently challenged 
Lessing to tell him what he meant by " Christian 
religion." This shifted the scene, and in his " Neces- 
sary Answer to a very Unnecessary Question " Les- 
sing says that to him personally the Christian religion 
is contained in the creeds of the first four centu- 
ries, which he goes on to show would form a true 
basis of union for all Christiaus, and so the wisest 
platform for the German state church. The unex- 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



105 



pected reply astonished and confounded his oppo- 
nents. They were silent. " Nowhere a sound/' said 
Lessing. " Even every frog in the swamps is dumb." 

So the controversy closed, but out of its bitterness 
was to come a sweet fruit, the dispassionate expres- 
sion of its results embalmed in the classical form of 
" Nathan the Wise." It is strange to think that in 
order to write this masterpiece Lessing was obliged 
to borrow money from a noble-minded Jew of Ham- 
burg that he might have bread to eat till it could be 
offered for sale (1779). 

The essential idea of " Nathan " is that men should 
be tolerant, that they should not presume " the neces- 
sary universality of their religion." That this idea 
was not new in Lessing's mind is clear from his early 
dramas, " The Freethinker " and " The Jews." Else- 
where, too, Lessing had taught that virtue rests in 
action, not in belief, and he could truly say : " Nathan's 
disposition toward all positive religions has always 
been mine." But though the hero of the drama is a 
Jew and one of its noblest characters a Mohammedan, 
while those who represent intolerance and vulgar 
prejudice are nominally Christians, the drama is none 
the less essentially Christian in its ideals. Indeed 
that is precisely why Christians are here chosen for 
reprobation, since, as Shakspere aptly says : — 

" Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds, 
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." 

Intolerance is never so intolerant as in a Christian, 
vulgar prejudice never so vulgar. A good Jew, Les- 



106 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



sing seems to say to us, is better than a bad Chris- 
tian. With the bad Jew we have no need to concern 
ourselves. It must be clear that only the teaching of 
human brotherhood, which is essentially Christian, 
could make possible this lofty conception of general 
toleration. 

As a philosophic essay in dramatic form " Nathan" 
holds a unique place in German literature ; but 
judged solely as a drama, it has obvious and great 
faults. Lessing thought it would probably never be 
put on the stage, and said (April 18, 1779) that if 
it were acted it would produce but little effect. And 
he did not live to see his foreboding disproved. But 
" Nathan " has long become popular in all the great 
theatres of Germany, and all its great actors have 
essayed the r6le of the magnanimous Jew. At first, 
however, the reception accorded to the work was 
cold, owing to the machinations of the Lutheran 
party, and to the ease with which they could twist 
the drama to an irreligious meaning, that deceived 
the thoughtless. They even secured its prohibition 
in several parts of Germany. It was not until the 
early years of the present century that the literary 
public began to realize the deep beauty and profound 
wisdom of this almost the last gift of their great 
emancipator. 

For the end was coming fast. In the two years 
that followed the appearance of " Nathan " he pur- 
sued that lofty theme in his "Education of the 
Human Eace," and extended its principles to a politi- 
cal sphere in the " Conversations for Free Masons." 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



107 



The preface to this last book contains a passage char- 
acteristic of the essay and of the man. He addresses 
the Duke of Brunswick: "I, too," he says, "have 
been at the fountain of truth. I have drawn from it ; 
how deeply, he only can judge from whom I await 
permission to draw still deeper. The people languish 
long and are perishing." These words have a bold 
ring when we recall that they were addressed to the 
man who was to lead the coalition against the French 
Revolutionists at Valmy. Instead of the permission 
to draw deeper, came the censorship upon what was 
drawn already. The duke knew that the rotten props 
of his political house would not bear shaking. He 
had no mind to hear again what Lessing had said in his 
" Dramaturgy," that " there was no German nation." 
It is therefore from posthumous papers that we learn 
that Lessing had already conceived of German unity 
under one sovereign, and had put his finger with ac- 
curate diagnosis on the causes of the political lethargy 
of his time. Indeed, he anticipated very exactly the 
course that the revolution actually took in Germany 
in the rearousing of national life that we associate 
with the year 1843. But in these "Conversations 
for Free Masons " there are other sayings also that 
point with the finger of the seer to a purer republi- 
can socialism than has yet been realized, or than 
bourgeois republicans would desire. No wonder the 
duke, who w T as even then selling his subjects to Eng- 
land for the American war, felt that here or never 
was the place for the censor's pencil. 

In these last writings Lessing seems to have his 



108 



MODERN GERMA.N LITERATURE. 



eyes fixed on the distant prospect. In all of them 
there is a far-off objectivity. Yet he is no visionary, 
but rather a seer to whom the hard and bitter experi- 
ence of the world has taught its last lesson of self- 
denying wisdom. He wrote always in the room 
where his wife had died, with mind erect, like a sen- 
tinel on guard, yet with his heart reaching out to 
another world, and his body gradually giving w T ay 
under the long strain, " not sick, but far from well," 
as he said, until at last, while on a visit to Bruns- 
wick, he broke down completely, and died after a 
brief illness, February 15th, 1781. 

The last scene was striking. He had seemed 
slightly better that day, and toward evening some 
friends called to see him. While they were waiting 
in an adjoining room suddenly the sick man himself 
appeared at the door. With an heroic presentiment 
of the end he had bidden his attendant dress him, 
but his face already bore the marks of death, and, it 
is said, had a strange unearthly glory. He went to 
his weeping step-daughter, Amalie Konig, and affec- 
tionately pressed her hand. Then he made a cour- 
teous bow to the guests. Already he could speak no 
more ; his feet failed him, and hardly had their kind 
hands laid him on a sofa when he expired. 

The loss was felt most by the greatest. Goethe, 
who had never met him, wrote : " Less than a q uarter 
of an hour before I heard of his death I had made a 
plan to visit Lessing. We lose much in him, more 
than we realize." So thought the young man of 
thirty-two. And to the old man of seventy-six the 



LESSING THE REFORMER. 



109 



stature of his great predecessor had grown grander by 
distance. " We need a man like Lessing," he said to 
Eckermann [Oct. 15, 1825]. " For he is great by his 
character and tenacity of will. Clever and cultured 
men there are in plenty, but where is such a char- 
acter ? " The venerable Gleim was even more em- 
phatic in his funeral verses that closed with the 
words : " God said, Let there be light, and Leibnitz 
came. God said, Let darkness be, and Lessing 
died." 

In a poem by Eliza Eeimarus, Truth is made to 
claim Lessing as her peculiar champion, and this 
seems to have been the general contemporary feeling 
so far as it had free expression. But the orthodox 
leaders found new courage to kick the dead lion. By 
their request the press of Hamburg was forbidden to 
print any obituary notice or poem upon him who has 
ever been the chief of her literary stars. The Duke 
of Brunswick, whom Lessing had served beyond his 
deserts, did indeed bury at the State expense one who 
had no wealth to leave as the result of a life devoted 
to the common good. But the grave was left with- 
out a memorial, and for a time men actually forgot 
the spot that Germany now honors with a noble 
monument. 

For the fame of Lessing grows as his age recedes 
and as the old order changes. Goethe has observed 
that " Lessing lingers in the region of contradiction 
and doubt. Critical distinctions are his strongest 
side." This alone would make him sympathetic to 
our questioning age. Then, too, as the perspective 



110 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



recedes and men and theories come to take their due 
proportions, we see him more and more as he was, a 
noble, unselfish, truth-loving, man ; gentle and char- 
itable to all, stern only in his hatred of cowardice, 
hypocrisy, and falsehood. More and more we learn 
to estimate what he did. He restored the drama to 
Germany, he gave her true canons of aesthetic and 
dramatic criticism ; he released her from the fetters of 
a petrified orthodoxy, and taught her to breathe the 
free air of a more tolerant and loftier Christianity ; he 
opened to her social and political life vistas of repub- 
lican liberty. More than all, he gave her sons the 
example of a devoted life, which poverty and suffer- 
ing could not daunt, which even his brief happiness 
could not weaken or divert from its loftiest aims. 
Well might Goethe say : — 

" While thou wast living we honored thee as one of the gods ; 
Now thou art dead presides over our spirits thy spirit." 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



Ill 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE YOUNG GOETHE. 

" Nature wanted to see how she looked and she 
created Goethe." So said Heine, the most brilliant 
of his continuators. The literature that has gathered 
around this great name during our century is so vast 
that it might form the study of years. Every phase 
of his genius has been made the subject of mono- 
graphs, every principal work has called forth elabo- 
rate commentary. A review is devoted solely to the 
interests and investigations of those who make him a 
special study, and he who approaches Goethe to-day 
with the thought of saying or discovering what is 
new must confine his attention to a narrow field, or, 
if he would grasp the whole, he must be willing to 
devote a large share of his life to the task. Most 
helpful in estimating the place and importance of 
Goethe's various works and periods will be found 
the criticisms of Wilhelm Scherer, Erich and Julian 
Schmidt, and Hermann Grimm. For the life of 
Goethe, Duntzer is probably the most meticulously 
accurate, Lewes the most entertaining. This essay 
owes much to all of these students, as well as to study 
of the original works themselves. 



112 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Goethe was born at Frankfort, August 28th, 1749. 
Both the place and his parents are significant for his 
youthful development, and both bring us into new 
fields. Wieland and Lessing had been sons of clergy- 
men, "Herder a schoolmaster's boy, all in very narrow 
circumstances. Goethe sprang from the commercial 
class, then closely affiliated with political life in what 
remained of the " Free Cities." His paternal grand- 
father had been a tailor and inn-keeper, a prosperous 
and generous man, as it seems, for he gave his son a 
good education, so that he developed a taste for travel, 
which he gratified by an extended tour in Italy. 
With the advantages of such culture, John Caspar 
Goethe achieved the distinction of Beichsrath , or Im- 
perial Counsellor, and though never very rich, seems 
always to have been in easy circumstances. In 1748 
he married Catherine Elizabeth Textor, or Weber, as 
the family sometimes called themselves in this gener- 
ation and afterward. Johann Wolfgang was the first 
of six children, but only a sister Cornelia survived to 
be the companion of his young manhood. 

Goethe's father, the Counsellor, seldom unbends 
from his philistine self-satisfaction as he appears 
in the brilliant pages of Goethe's autobiographical 
" Dicht ungund Wahrheit." But the mother was a 
very remarkable woman, and one of the most sympa- 
thetic figures in German literature. " Simple, hearty, 
joyous, and affectionate, she was the delight of chil- 
dren and (later) the favorite of poets and princes." 
Her very household name, Frau Aja, though derived 
from an old ballad, seems to suggest bustling, good- 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



113 



humored hospitality. She was not highly educated, 
but she had a happy faculty of rapid assimilation, so 
that she was no unworthy companion or correspon- 
dent of persons of deeper culture or higher station. 
That she was a mother at eighteen seemed only to 
renew her youth. " I and my Wolfgang," she said, 
" have always held fast ,to each other, because we 
were both young together." His childhood and 
youth owed far more to her direct influence than to 
all else beside. 

But Goethe came not only from a burgher family, 
he came from a commercial city, then even more than 
now a centre of German financial life. The men 
of whom we have spoken hitherto were all country 
bred. The young Goethe had around him all the busy 
life of the present and at the same time the monu- 
ments of ancient greatness, and of industrialism 
grafted on the feudal stock ; for Frankfort, more per- 
haps than any other commercial centre, was and still 
is, at once very old and very new, the present jostles 
the past as in few cities of Germany ; and the old 
and the new, in turn and together, could not fail to 
leave their impress on the brilliant and receptive 
boy. 

As usual, there are many tales of his precocity. 
Let it suffice to say that at eight he had already 
made fair progress in German, French, Italian, Latin, 
and Greek, as written exercises still testify. This he 
owed chiefly to his father. The mother meantime 
was training his imagination in a very charming way, 
which she thus describes herself : " I was as eager as 

8 1 



114 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



the children themselves for the hours of story-telling. 
I was quite curious about the future course of my 
own improvisation, and any invitation which inter- 
rupted these evenings was unwelcome. There I sat, 
and Wolfgang held me with his large black eyes, and 
when the fate of one of his favorites was not accord- 
ing to his fancy, I could see the angry vein swell on 
his temples and watch him repress his tears. He 
often burst out with : ' But, mother, the princess 
won't marry the nasty tailor, even if he does kill the 
giant.' And when I made a pause for the night, 
promising to continue the story on the next day, I was 
sure that meanwhile he would think it out for him- 
self, and so he often stimulated my imagination. 
When I turned the story according to Ins plan and 
told him that he had found out the denouement, he 
was all fire and flame, and one could see his little 
heart beating underneath his dress." A charming 
picture, truly, of the girl-mother and her boy. 1 

Goethe was but four years old when his nursery 
was enlivened by a puppet-show, another stimulus to 
imagination on which he lays much stress in his 
novel, " Wilhelm Meister." Except for a brief inter- 
val which was not a pleasant experience he never 
went regularly to school, but had lessons at home 
under his father's eye. Already he had a strong 
feeling of his superiority. " I am not satisfied with 
what does for other people," said the little aristocrat 

1 She died in 1808. Her charming letters have been recently 
published by the Goethe Society of Weimar. See also " Nineteenth 
Century," April, 1894, p. 649, and Heinemann, "Goethe's Mutter." 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



115 



of seven ; and again, when they tried to correct his 
pompous gait, he gravely answered : " I begin with 
this. By and by I will distinguish myself in another 
way." 

When he was ten the French troops occupied 
Frankfort. This contributed materially to Goethe's 
culture. It polished his French and gave him w 7 ider 
acquaintance both with the ways of the great stage 
of the world and the little stage of the Frankfort 
theatre, where the youngster became an habitue of 
the green-room, and at twelve fought a bloodless duel, 
after which the two combatants were reconciled over 
glasses of almond milk. Goethe's early dramatic 
essays were due no doubt to reminiscences of these 
theatrical days. 

He continued to study books and men at Frank- 
fort till he was 16, when his father sent him to Leip- 
zig to study law. But already he had found time to 
become a blighted being and to recover his heart 
again with the facile mobility of youth. In after 
life he seldom repeated the experience of loving in 
vain, for he fascinated all who came within the 
sphere of his influence. 

Leipzig, in 1765, was rather a home of the classic 
muses than of the Christian virtues. Gottsched was 
still a power, and French notions prevailed, not in 
literature alone, but in the unrestrained society of 
that city, the " little Paris " of Germany. Goethe's 
student letters show how quickly he caught the 
spirit which accorded so well with his own nature. 
A citation is worth more than pages of comment on 



116 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



these three years of his life. On October 20, 1765, 
he writes to Kiese : " To-day I have heard two lec- 
tures, — Bohme on law, Ernesti on Cicero's Orator. 
That '11 do, won't it ? Next week we shall have 
philosophy and mathematics. I have n't seen Gott- 
sched yet. He is married again. She is 19, he 65 ; 
she is 4 feet high, he is 7 ; she is as thin as a herring, 
he is as broad as a feathersack. I make a great figure 
here, but as yet I am no dandy. I sha'n't be either. 
It takes an effort to be industrious. In society, con- 
certs, theatre, feasts, and drives, as the weather per- 
mits. Oh, but it goes gloriously. Yet it costs. 
Devil knows how my purse suffers. Stay ! rescue ! 
stop ! Don't you see them running ? There go two 
louis d'ur! Help! There goes another! Heavens! 
Another couple are gone ! Groschen are here as 
kreutzer are with you in the empire. But one can 
live cheaply, so I hope to get through with 300 
thalers, — what do I say ? — with 200, not counting 
what has already gone to the devil." 1 

His letters to his sister, too, are full of overflowing 
spirits, — sometimes in French, then a little English, 
and even English verse, lame enough to be sure. He 
likes to remember the Frankfort girls, and has a word 
now and then about his Leipzig flames. At the same 
time, too, he was writing love songs, partly for the 
composer Breitkopf, his friend, partly, it seems, for 
the use and behoof of love-lorn acquaintances. He 
now began to take an interest in art and to study the 
technique of engraving, and so prepared himself to 
1 Goethe, Brief e (Weimar, Bohlau), i. 14, 15. 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



117 



appreciate the " Laokoon," which was to form an 
epoch in his poetic development. 

In all this he was learning much more about life 
than about law, and exercising himself in metres and 
private theatricals more zealously than in Ulpian or 
Justinian. Add to all that, a genuine and tantalized 
love for Katchen Schonkopf, a lively young girl of 
nineteen, at whose house Goethe regularly dined. 
This fascinating coquette teased him not a little, as we 
see from his letters, though in the embellished auto- 
biography he has seen fit to reverse the relations, and 
it was in the same more flatten ncr form that he em- 
bodied his experience in " Die Laune des Verliebten." 
For all through Goethe's life it was his author's in- 
stinct to put into literary form every experience that 
came to him, and thus to obtain toward it an objec- 
tive position. It is in this sense that he says : " All 
my works are confessions of my life." 

These lively years at Leipzig seem gradually to 
have undermined his health, and in this physically 
weak state he naturally saw things from their seamy 
side. If life had ever presented itself to him with 
any idealist glamor he was soon and permanently dis- 
illusioned. It is strange, almost sad, to find a young 
man of eighteen with such worldly wise views of life 
as find expression in " Die Mitschuldigen," The Fel- 
low Sinners, who after showing nearly every variety 
of vice and meanness find it convenient to agree to- 
gether to forgive and forget. It is indeed the moral 
of the Woman taken in Adultery, but it comes witli 
a painful cynicism from the student's pen. We can 



118 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



see, however, from these first dramatic efforts of 
Goethe that he was sure to be a realist in intention. 
As one of his friends wrote : " With Goethe you are 
always on terra firma." He idealizes neither the 
world nor individual characters. As Lewes puts it, 
" His drama is without a chorus. Goethe seldom tells 
you what an object is like. He tells you what it is." 
His realism shows itself thus not alone in matter but 
in form also. 

The autumn of 1768 found Goethe decidedly ill 
and glad to return to Frankfort, where he remained 
sick and convalescent till April, 1770. Meantime 
Katchen married, so that episode was closed, not 
without some pain. He plucked up courage and 
wrote to her cheerfully, sending little gifts ; but he 
never saw her again. This year and a half of fruitful 
leisure gave Goethe first of all a deeper insight into 
the critical work of Lessing, from which he gained a 
sharper aesthetic sense and a more balanced mind. 
It was then, too, that he began those scientific studies 
in his father's attic that later in life were to make 
part of his rounded fame. An amiable acquaintance, 
Fraulein von Klettenberg, the Schdne Seele of " Wil- 
helm Meister," became deeply interested in his spir- 
itual condition, and from her he got at least an 
objective knowledge of pietistic religious experience, 
though he proved himself a refractory subject. It 
was through her, also, that he became interested in 
alchemy and kindred lore, which proved useful in 
the elaboration of " Faust." 

His father wished him to continue his studies, but 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



119 



not at Leipzig, so he went to Strasburg, then a 
French city, but German in its population and spirit. 
This was a good field for cosmopolitan training, and 
he brought to it a mind sobered by experience and 
reflection, while his returning health had brought 
with it good spirits. So he set himself earnestly 
both to learn dancing and to pass his preliminary 
legal examination. He had already begun work on 
his dissertation when, in September, he met Herder, 
then in Strasburg on account of his eyes, and, in 
October, made the fateful acquaintance of Friederike 
Biron. the winning daughter of the pastor of Sesen- 
heim. The dissertation yielded to the fascinations 
of scholarly intercourse and the charms of the pas- 
toral maiden. 

The good parson and his family suggested to 
Goethe the " Vicar of Wakefield," and in the drama 
that followed it is impossible to acquit Goethe alto- 
gether of playing a part akin to Burchill's in that 
well-known tale. In the idyllic surroundings of 
Sesenheim, Friederike had seemed to him altogether 
charming. He had loved her and he had let her 
love him. But her visit to Strasburg broke the 
pastoral spell. He had no wish, he might have felt 
he had no moral right, to fetter his fortunes or his 
genius, to a country girl, however charming. But 
when he left Strasburg, in August, 1771, he left be- 
hind him Friederike's broken heart, and his own was 
not unscathed. He carried with him for years a 
sense of a wrong to be atoned. In the Maria of 
"Gotz," the Marie of "Clavigo," the Clarchen of 



120 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



u Egmont/' and the Gretchen of u Faust" we may see 
so many efforts to cleanse his bosom of the perilous 
stuff that pre} T ed upon his heart ; from these he grad- 
ually won the purely objective position that charac- 
terizes the episode in "Dichtung und Wahrheit." 
But whatever he may have felt of passion for Friede- 
rike was soon blunted by a genial sense of youthful 
egotism. She carried her simpler love through weary 
years of faithful service to a consumptive's grave, and 
died, unmarried, in 1813. 

Meantime the long months of Herder's clinical con- 
finement had fostered a close intimacy with Goethe, 
one of the few companions of his sick-room. They 
read together Herder's essay on the " Origin of Lan- 
guage," as well as the " Vicar of Wakefield " at the 
very time that Goethe was putting it into action. 
They talked much of the great literatures of France 
and England, and Herder taught Goethe that distrust 
of French critical canons and that truer appreciation 
of Shakspere that Lessing had already proclaimed. To 
him, too, Goethe owed his appreciation of the essen- 
tially national character of all poetic development, 
which, with brief aberrations during the height of 
Schiller's influence, remained his constant conviction. 
And, more than all, he led the young Goethe to appre- 
ciate Piousseau, whose teaching was one of the great 
disintegrating forces of the eighteenth century. This 
is reflected in " Gotz," and even more clearly in the 
" Sorrows of Werther," which would be hardly ex- 
plicable without Rousseau's " JSTouvelle Heloise." 1 

1 Fester, in his "Rousseau und die Deutsche Geschichtsphiloso- 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



121 



Herder's influence on Goethe was in every way fur- 
thering. Even his relentless, and doubtless carping, 
criticism of the younger poet was a needed chastening 
for one who was already revolving the strange medi- 
aeval story of the iron-handed knight and the weird 
legend of Dr. Faust. 

Herder was a good teacher, as we know, clear, 
forceful, proselyting. Yet he seems to have been 
blissfully unconscious that he was talking to a supe- 
rior genius. Goethe was to him a "good fellow, 
somewhat frivolous and sparrowlike." Indeed, the 
younger poet fell at first quite under the influence of 
this momentarily superior critical mind. He com- 
pares himself to Jacob wrestling with the angel ; he 
wishes he could live always with Herder, -and in im- 
agination holds constant conversation with him. But 
by and by he regained a more sober judgment, saw 
that Herder was rather conceited, and answered a 
somewhat supercilious letter of his from Buckeburg, 
with the significant declaration that he preferred to 
be one of the least of planets to revolve about the 
sun, than the satellite of the greatest of all planets. 
Herder was indeed but five years his senior, and per- 
haps even then jealous of the rising star. 

This meeting with Herder at Strasburg was the 
beginning of a long intercourse, — it can hardly be 
called friendship in its later phases, — but it was 
several years before they met again. Goethe returned 

phie," attributes to Wieland the chief part in familiarizing Ger- 
many with Rousseau's social theories. His co-operation is certain, 
hut in Goethe his influence was less direct than that of Herder. 



122 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

to Frankfort and began the nominal practice of law. 
He had published nothing as yet under his own 
name, being never eager for literary notoriety ; but in 
Frankfort he contributed numerous critical notices to 
the press and began serious work on " Gotz," which 
he intended to be a proclamation of the new liberties 
of the German stage, more daring than the cautious 
Lessing would have ventured or approved. The 
young bloods of Germany, and Goethe with them, 
had caught the new spirit, and in this decade of 
" storm and stress," as it was called from one of their 
dramas, they held high carnival, following Shakspere 
blindly and, as was natural, showing more of his 
faults than of his spirit. 

In this movement Goethe's " Gotz von Berlichin- 
gen " takes the same place that Hugo's " Preface to 
Cromwell " and " Hernani " take in the French 
drama. Gotz was a robber knight of the sixteenth 
century, from whose naive autobiography Goethe takes 
a series of pictures, bright with local color, to which 
his own imagination adds as many more. In its first 
form the play was finished in 1771, but this proved 
too lawless even for Goethe's taste at that period, and 
it did not see the light till it was printed in 1840, as 
a curious monument of a strange time of ferment. 
In a modified form it was published in 1773, and 
again revised on a later occasion for the Weimar 
stage. In his autobiography Goethe tells the story 
of its first composition, confessing that his dramatic 
construction had gone beyond all theatrical limits in 
seeking to ^realize the life of this "noblest of Ger- 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



123 



mans," as he appeared to the young Goethe, because 
his simple sturdy independence foreshadowed the 
struggles of the eighteenth century in its reassertion 
of individualism. 

For in the play, more even than in Gotz's own 
chronicle, the hero is the representative of native 
rebellion against the fetters that the Roman law and 
church laid on the Teutonic spirit. Eelics of these 
fetters could be seen everywhere in Germany in 
Goethe's day. The glaring discord between theory 
and practice was as strong as ever. To the young 
Goethe the only progress practicable seemed to lie in 
the development of individuality, and so he brings 
before us " Gotz " as the ante-type of Young Germany, 
of the eccentric genius of the " Storm and Stress." This 
will account for its immediate and universal success. 
It struck a responsive chord in every heart, and 
made its still unnamed author, as even Herder was 
constrained somewhat grudgingly to admit, the anony- 
mous literary leader of his time. 

If Gotz's own story furnished the outline, Goethe 
allowed himself a free hand in filling in the picture. 
Many of his characters are new. Thus Maria and 
Weislingen suggest his own experiences with Friede- 
rike at Sesenheim, Lerse seems to have been studied 
from a Strasburg friend of the same name, and Adel- 
heid, that evil genius, fair but satanic, seems one of 
those free creations of fancy that are rare in Goethe's 
works. 

In " Gotz " all the unities are thrown to the winds. 
It is not in any sense a Shaksperian drama, it is the 



124 MODERN GERMAN LITEEATURE. 



dramatic presentation of an epoch, a succession of 
pictures. The characters reveal but do not explain 
themselves any more than they would in real life. 
Hence Lessing thought that its influence on the de- 
velopment of dramatic art was retardative in spite of 

- the immense stimulus that it gave to dramatic pro- 
duction ; for it was, as a critic of the time said, in 
any case "a captivating monstrosity." 

It may comfort aspirants to literary fame to know 
that Goethe, who had already sought in vain a pub- 
lisher for " Die Mitschuldigen," printed " Gotz " at 
his own expense and, thanks to a pirated edition, lost 
money by the venture, while all Germany rang with 
its praises, and imitations sprang up like mushrooms 

v over night. A bookseller even offered him good terms 
for " a dozen similar plays," so true is it that nothing 
succeeds like success. 

Before this appearance of the revised " Gotz " 
Goethe had been through a new and fruitful experi- 
ence of love. At his father's wish he had gone to 
Wetzlar to further his law practice. While there he 
had met and loved at first sight Charlotte Buff ; but 
she happened to be engaged to his friend Kestner, 
who indeed had introduced Goethe to his charming be- 
trothed, and her eleven younger brothers and sisters for 
whom she cared like the executive little person that 
she was. Neither Kestner nor Lotte were deceived 
as to his feelings, nor as it seems particularly dis- 
turbed by them. Indeed, Goethe, at a little party at 
Lotte's house, actually presented Kestner with a book 
in which he had written dedicatory verses ending 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



125 



with the request that his friend would never forget 
one who had loved him and — loved with him. 
" How much nobility on all sides," is Lewes' singular 
comment on this rather delicate situation, which 
Goethe finally solved by taking a sudden departure 
with never a word of farewell (Sept. 11, 1772). His 
aunt, with singular fatuity, wrote to Lotte to apolo- 
gize for her nephew's ill-manners. The spirited 
girl wrote back to ask why she had not taught him 
better. The lovers were sorry to lose him, and 
Lotte, Kestner says, had a good cry over it. By and 
by Goethe furnishes the wedding ring, and the first 
boy is named Wolfgang, after their distinguished 
friend. 

And yet on his way back to Frankfort this facile 
young man managed to get up heart for a flirtation 
with Maximiliane von Laroche, the future mother of 
his last adorer, Bettina von Arnim-Brentano. But 
from Frankfort he kept up a lively correspondence 
with the happy lovers. He tells Lotte he has found 
" a new maiden," presumably Antoinette Gerock, and 
soon after he found a second flame, Anna Munch, 
for whom he wrote " Clavigo." He had also the 
additional responsibility of consoling the just married 
Maximiliane " for the smell of oil and cheese and the 
behavior of her husband," as we learn from his friend, 
the somewhat cynical Merck. 

Amid these varied distractions, and sobered by the 
absence of some dear friends, Goethe sought relief 
from Wetzlar memories by giving them literary ex- 
pression in the " Sorrows of Werther," perhaps the 



126 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

most "beautiful piece of German prose that exists to- 
day, and certainly in its time revealing unimagined 
powers in the German tongue. This was published 
in 1774 Of course he sent Lotte a copy and with 
it a note to this happy mamma which is worth citing 
as characteristic of the time : " Lotte, how dear this 
little book is to me, thou wilt feel in reading it ; and 
this copy is as dear to me as if it were the only one 
in the world. Thou must have it, Lotte; I have 
kissed it a hundred times, have kept it locked up, 
that no one might touch it. Oh, Lotte ! . . . I wish 
each to read it alone, thou alone, Kestner alone, and 
each to write me a little word about it, Lotte. Adieu, 
Lotte." Kestner, as one may imagine, was not par- 
ticularly edified at this enforced publicity. As for the 
letter itself, that is not passion, it is playful sentiment ; 
and sentimentality, rather than strong passion, was 
the. character of the period as reflected in the " Sorrows 
of Werther." 

The eighteenth century had been a period of social 
aud moral disintegration in Europe. Men had be- 
come restless, discontented. They felt that the 
present conditions could not last, but they saw no 
outlet ; and so energies that might have been turned 
to political life were often wasted in gloomy intro- 
spection and morbid sentimentality. Eousseau had 
taught men to look fondly to the imaginary " state of 
nature " as an ideal, at all social law as a mistaken 
restraint. The will of men was weakened, while the 
scope of their desires was enlarged. They were ready 
to exchange " the clear world of Homer for the form- 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 127 

less world of Ossian " then at the height of its fame 
in Germany. Such a generation might well be typi- 
fied in Werther or in Weislingen, as indeed it was 
by the young Goethe in one phase of his multi- 
plex character. A nightmare lay over the minds of 
men, and Goethe's morbid book touched a responsive 
chord in most varied breasts. Napoleon carried it 
with him to Egypt, while for the common folk it 
was peddled in the market-places in cheap editions. 
The clear-sighted and strong-headed Lessing was al- 
most alone in demanding "a concluding chapter, and 
the more cynical the better." But for Goethe, here 
as so often, the very writing seemed to clarify his 
mind, and he became serene, sometimes even stoical. 
There were passing clouds, but there was no storm 
for the rest of his long life. He had conquered con- 
trol of himself at last. 

To a saner generation this story of the hopeless 
love of a man for his friend's wife, ending in his dis- 
pairing suicide, has an element of the childish and 
comic. Involuntarily one recalls Thackeray's dog- 
gerel ballad which tells the unadorned tale. But the 
suicide was as true to life then as the rest, though of 
course the victim was not Lotte's lover, but a certain 
Jerusalem, whom Goethe had met at Wetzlar, and 
whose tragic end under like circumstances Goethe, 
with an eye to realism, had invited Kestner to detail 
to him as circumstantially as possible. Werther is 
what Goethe saw he was tending to become when 
he fled from Lotte and Wetzlar. As some one lias 
wittily said : " The other writers of the ' Storm and 



128 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

Stress ' were only patients ; Goethe was patient and 
physician." 

Almost immediately after the completion of " Wer- 
ther " Goethe wrote " Clavigo," a play founded on 
the memoirs of Beaumarchais, which, though the first 
work published Under his name, is of no very serious 
merit. " Such trash you must not write again/' said 
the frank Merck ; " others can do that." And now 
began a period of great creative fecundity, the fruits 
of which were to appear later in "Faust," "Prome- 
theus," " Egmont," " Stella," and many minor poems. 
This activity was temporarily checked, probably to 
Goethe's ultimate gain, first by his attachment to Lili 
Schonemann, then, more durably, by his summons to 
the court of Weimar, both in the year 1775. The new 
love did indeed inspire " Erwin and Elmire " and 
some of Goethe's best lyrics. Bat he was not a com- 
fortable lover; he was eccentric, Lili young and 
rather spoiled, and then he was not rich enough for 
the banker's daughter ; and so, though at one time be- 
trothed, the lovers drew apart again. This was the 
nearest approach that Goethe ever made to a love- 
match. His marriage, long deferred, was of quite a 
different character. Lili afterward married Baron 
von Turckheim, and bore nobly the misfortunes that 
came to her from the French Eevolution. Goethe 
always remembered her tenderly to the last, while 
she preserved him in almost sacred memory, and in 
after years sought an opportunity to let him know 
indirectly how much she felt her moral nature owed 
to him. But by a strange fatality, the letter that she 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



129 



had bidden a friend to write to him in 1795 reached 
the poet's hands thirty-five years later, as he was him- 
self sinking to the grave. He pressed it to his lips, 
and wished its writer, " when a like occasion should 
come, as happy a refreshment." 1 

His final separation from Lili had hardly taken 
place (September, 1775) when welcome relief came to 
him in the invitation of Karl August to become a 
member of his court at Weimar, whither he went in 
November, gladly, though much against his father's 
will. That sturdy burgher could not but think of 
Voltaire and Frederic. But Karl August was a man 
of finer grain, though smaller mould, than the Prus- 
sian hero, and Goethe was not Voltaire. 

In what it involved, the coming of Goethe to Wei- 
mar is the most important event for the literary life 
of Germany in this generation. It is from this year 
that Goethe's influence begins to be paramount where- 
ever his language is spoken, so much that a distin- 
guished critic has called the hundred years that 
followed " the century of Goethe." 

Weimar, capital of the duchy of like name, was 
and is a pretty city, distinguished ever since the bril- 
liant days of Karl August by a literary tone that has 
made it a pleasant residence for the cultured and for 
youth in search of culture. Before his time it had 
no promise of distinction. It is through him, almost 
solely, that it earned and merited the name of the 
German Athens. 

1 Hermann Grimm, Goethe, i. 275. 
9 



130 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE., 



• 



" Small among Germany's princes truly is mine, 
Narrow and small is his land, moderate only his power." 

said Goethe, in a poem whose thoughtful apprecia- 
tion was better than adulation to his magnanimous 
friend. No other prince in Germany has ever doue 
so much for literature, though few have had more 
slender means. And Karl August wins our sym- 
pathy, too, by his personal character, — full of plans 
for the welfare and prosperity of his subjects, unam- 
bitious for himself, very simple in his tastes, yet far 
from all austerity, with a healthy capacity for pleas- 
ure, and much of that robust joy of life that charac- 
terized Goethe. • The prince lacked indeed his friend's 
high sense of personal dignity, so that he sometimes 
offended, not without cause, his high-minded, but 
prim and narrowly aristocratic wife, Luise. This 
princess stands with her namesake of Prussia in the 
minds of German women for what they consider 
noblest in German womanhood, but she had little 
sympathy with her husband's literary aspirations, and 
looked at first with suspicion on the men of genius 
whom he gathered around him as the companions of 
his hours of relaxation. 

Weimar was then as now quiet, dignified, full of 
repose. It had perhaps 7,000 inhabitants and a fine 
park, but its great ducal residence had just been 
burned. Beautiful surroundings there were, too, — 
Berka, Ettersburg. and a little further Jena, loveliest 
of university towns, nestled amid its circling hills by 
the winding Saale, whose charms might almost rival 
the incomprehensible fascination, or shall we say the 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



131 



fascinating incomprehensibleness, of the new school 
of metaphysicians, Hegel, Fichte, and others, that 
made its lecture-rooms famous over all the land. And 
to the west of Weimar was Eisenach, with its memo- 
ries of Luther and the Minstrels' War (Sangerkrieg) 
on the Wartburg; and beyond, the glorious Thuringian 
Forest, all soon to be familiar to Goethe and his 
princely companion. 

Between these two men the relation was at first 
very intimate, then, as each grew older and gained a 
more developed individuality, more formal, but cor- 
dial to the end. Not so, however, between them and 
the petty nobility of the court, who, with the Duchess 
Luise, looked jealously on the new favorite. Indeed 
it is clear that for many years art and literature at 
Weimar enjoyed only an artificial eminence, which 
the death of Karl August would have caused them 
to lose almost immediately. The prince's mother, 
Amalie, was his only aristocratic ally, — a charming 
young woman, then only thirty-six, who had done 
her son the inestimable service to make Wieland his 
tutor, and had learned Greek herself from the same 
genial teacher. No blue-stocking she ; rather, a 
bright, joyous woman, a good dancer, fond of masked 
balls, and even of a little polite gambling. But she 
was not frivolous, for with all this lightheadedness 
she was a good executive officer and managed her 
duchy well during the minority of her sou, while her 
correspondence with Goethe's mother shows a mind 
far above aristocratic prejudices. She even sent that 
estimable lady a pair of garters that she had knit 



132 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

with her own princely hands, and addressed her as 
" Dear Mother," and " Dear Frau Aja." 1 

When Goethe came to Weimar Wieland was its 
literary pillar and his "Deutscher Merkur" its 
oracle. No other of the Weimar literati of 1775 de- 
serves special mention unless it be Frau von Stein, 
one of Amalie's ladies-of-honor, who was to involve 
Goethe in a long platonic attachment that might 
seem calculated to have a great and valuable influ- 
ence on his literary and moral development. That 
the influence was great there is no doubt ; it had 
value, too, but it was not unmixed with disturbing 
elements, as will appear presently. 

How Goethe was received in Weimar the genial 
Wieland, whom the young poet had satirized not 
long before, 2 may tell us as an unprejudiced witness. 
" How certainly I felt at the very first glance that he 
was a man after my own heart ! How I loved the 
magnificent youth as I sat beside him at table. . . . 
Since that morning my soul is as full of Goethe as 
a dewdrop of the morning sun. ... If Weimar can 
do anything his presence will accomplish it." In a 
strain of similar admiration Knebel, the translator of 
Lucretius and Propertius, writes : " He rose like a 
star in the heavens. Everybody worshipped him, 
especially the women," — Amalie first of all among 
them, for from the beginning she was fascinated with 
his genius. Socially, Weimar was ripe for the hero 

1 The letters of Duchess Amalie have been edited by Heinemann, 
who has added " Frau Aja's," also. (Leipzig : Seemann.) 

2 In his " Gotter, Helden, und Wieland.' 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



133 



of the " Sorrows of Werther," and soon entered on an 
orgy of sentimentalism which, as usual, tended to re- 
lax the ties of social tradition and perhaps morality 
also. The gentlemen, the duke at their head, donned 
the dress of Werther, and the ladies that winter went 
skating under Goethe's tuition, masked as for a 
Mardi-Gras carnival. So he led the society of Wei- 
mar for months together such a frolic dance as it had 
never seen. This is the way he writes of it to his 
Aunt Fahlmer : " The girls here are very pretty and 
nice, and I am on good terms with every one of 
them." Again he tells this same tolerant correspon- 
dent how he lies and flatters to every pretty face, and 
has the advantage that he always believes what he 
has said, at least for a moment. " With the dowager, 
Amalie, I am on very good terms, and we carry on 
all sorts of jokes and tricks," but the prim Luise and 
he " live only in glances and syllables." 

This round of gayety could not last forever, but the 
prudent Goethe took care that the enthusiasm should 
not flag while he was master of the revels. He 
slipped away from this danger, as he had done from 
that other at Wetzlar, and suddenly left for Waldeck. 
But, as Wieland said : " Weimar could no longer 
swim nor wade without him." Karl August insisted 
on his return, and in June of the next year made him 
Privy-Counsellor with a salary of 1200 thalers, then 
amply sufficient even for some luxury at this simple 
court. In writing to the poet's father of the matter, 
the duke says : " Goethe can have but one position, 
that of my friend ; all others are beneath him," But 



134 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



the duke was obliged to defend his action from carp- 
ing critics at home who could see no good to come 
from giving literary men a share in the public affairs, 
which they had been accustomed to regard as their 
peculiar domain. 

And so the gay life was resumed again, not much 
modified by the sermonizing of the scandalized 
Klopstock, who abandoned Goethe in disgust when 
he could not make him dance to his somewhat slow 
piping. There is no livelier picture, among the many 
that have come to us, of the best side of this gay life 
and carnival of genius than Gleim's story of his own 
experience there. " Soon after Goethe had written 
' Werther,' " Gleim tells us 1 that he " came to Wei- 
mar and wanted to meet him. I had the last ' Musen- 
almanach ' with me, and in the company where I 
was passing the evening I read a poem here and 
there. Meantime a young man, booted and spurred, 
in a short green hunting-jacket came in. I scarcely 
noticed it. He sat down opposite me and listened 
closely. I hardly know what it was about him that 
particularly struck me except his bright, black Italian 
eyes ; but I was destined to know more of him. 
During a pause the gallant young sportsman, for such 
I supposed him, rose, and bowing most winningly, 
offered to relieve me in reading, lest I should get 
tired. I could not but accept so polite an offer and 
gave him the book. But, by Apollo, the Muses, and 
Graces, what was I to hear ? At first things went 
smoothly enough. All at once, however, it was as 
1 The quotation, taken from Duuzer's Life, is somewhat condensed. 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



135 



though some wild, wanton devil had seized the young 
reader, and I thought I saw ' The Wild Huntsman ' 
bodily before me. He read poetry that was not in 
the ' Almanach ' at all, burst out into all kinds of 
styles and dialects, hexameters, iambics, doggerel, 
wild and humorous fancies ; and amid all this there 
came such noble, magnificent thoughts ! As soon as 
the joke was discovered everybody laughed, but he 
put us all out of countenance in one way or another. 
Even my Msecenasship had its turn in a little fable 
composed extempore in doggerel verses. 'That is 
either Goethe' or the devil,' cried I to Wieland, who 
sat opposite. ' Both,' he answered." 

Is not this a delightful picture of genial efferves- 
cence called forth by enthusiastic appreciation ? It is 
only just to Goethe, however, to cite also Wieland's 
words, who assures us that " from the moment Goethe 
decided on becoming a man of business he conducted 
himself with blameless wisdom and all worldly pru- 
dence." This courtly life was indeed of great value 
to the poet's mental development. It gave him that 
intimate contact with aristocratic society and with 
the wider horizons of political life that reflected itself 
in the balanced calm of his later writings and con- 
tributed to make them the precious heritage of future 
generations, so that to-day Germans are even more 
under the influence of his mind than they are students 
of his work. To this man, who was to write " Faust," 
" Wilhelm Meister," and " Tasso," and even to the fu- 
ture author of " Hermann and Dorothea," that life of 
courtier and counsellor was necessary. Far from his 



136 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



wasting time, as some have thoughtlessly averred, 
Providence could not have ordered it better for* the 
full evolution of his genius than that he should pass 
the ten years from 1776 to 1786 in active public life 
at Weimar. But his sterling good sense did not suffer 
him to prolong this apprenticeship beyond what was 
for his best. 

The first use that Goethe made of his influence 
with the duke was in favor of his old counsellor, 
Herder, to whom, in spite of the carping criticism 
that he had now outgrown, he felt full of gratitude. 
But Herder, as has been said, had aroused the bitter 
opposition of the conservative orthodox, and this 
opposition was naturally reflected on his supporter, 
who now found arrayed against him Duchess Luise, 
Baron Stein and his wife, the court chamberlain 
Goertz with the party of the old courtiers, and the 
church consistory. For the moment Goethe's influ- 
ence overcame opposition, Herder was summoned, and, 
once at Weimar, could be left to win his own way. 
But against Goethe the basest slanders were continu- 
ously and industriously circulated, especially by 
Goertz and the "unco' guid" of the consistory, and 
it was some time before he disarmed this personal 
opposition by a devotion to the routine of his new 
duties that ended in extorting the praise of his 
fellow-counsellors and silenced envious tongues. 

The outward history of Goethe's activity during 
the ten years that followed his official connection 
with Weimar can be briefly told. Ilmenau had been 
the scene of his gayest revels as the guest of Karl 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



137 



August. Now its mines claimed the counsellor's at- 
tention, and to gather observations for their develop- 
ment he made, in 1777, a journey to the mining 
districts of the Harz, whence he brought back a fund 
of experience of land and people that was put to 
good use in his "Faust" and in other poems also. 
In 1778 he assumed the direction of the Court- 
Theatre, and in 1779 of the War Department, with 
its army of 650 men, and the more serious responsi- 
bility of the roads and bridges of the duchy. Into 
all departments he brought a spirit of reform and 
roused the duke to nobler aspirations by silent influ- 
ence and even by direct admonition. And so at last 
he won the confidence even of Duchess Luise and of 
the unselfish element among the conservatives at 
court. 

In the autumn of 1779 he accompanied the prince 
on a journey to Switzerland. Their route led them 
through Sesenheim, and there he met again Friederike 
Biron, who was sadly silent of the old relation as they 
revisited the scenes of their former wooing. Goethe's 
letters to Frau von Stein during his Swiss journey 
are among the classics of travel. It was there, too, 
that he composed "Jery and Bateli," a light opera, 
for his theatre at the court, so that this experience 
also found literary expression. He returned to Wei- 
mar in January, 1780, and was immediately engrossed 
with administrative labors, " having to cook his ideas 
together with the army-bread," as he said. But his 
duties at Ilmenau had interested him in mineralogy, 
and he began at this period scientific studies that 



138 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



were afterward to prove of much value. Yet politi- 
cal life was not the goal of Goethe's ambition. He 
chafed more and more as years went by under its 
restraints, and in 1786 Karl August was fain to give 
his friend unlimited leave of absence that he might 
visit Italy. . 

Those public activities from which he thus sought 
escape had been hardly consistent with immediate 
literary fertility, but yet one can see how through 
these years the fountain was gathering strength that 
it might burst out more fully and richly than ever. 
The work of this decade is almost wholly under the 
indirect influence of Frau von Stein, and much of it 
is directly caused by Goethe's relations to her. She 
was a lady seven years his senior, and the mother of 
seven children, never very beautiful and now showing 
traces of age and care ; but her social, intellectual, 
and moral qualities had so won the poet that she held 
him faithful to her service for ten years, with no 
sacrifice of her dignity or self-respect. 

Charlotte von Stein was the first woman whom 
Goethe had known intimately, who was socially his 
superior, intellectually capable of comprehending and 
sympathizing with him, and whose ethical views 
would not bend to his own. She was far from shar- 
ing the ardor of his feelings, though she could not but 
be flattered by them. With remarkable tact she pre- 
served at once his love and his respect, and by making 
his life, as he said, " an enduring resignation," she 
gave his nature more refinement and self-control. If 
at times he broke through the bounds her sense of 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



139 



propriety induced her to draw, there might be brief 
" stormy scenes ; " but he always came back submis- 
sive after these "sun-showers of love" to her for 
whom he cannot find names of sufficiently extrava- 
gant endearment. He "worships" her, she is his. 
" golden lady," his " holy fate," his " soother " and 
." comforter," his " dear angel." 

This intimacy called fortli a multitude of letters, 
that make an invaluable key to Goethe's life and 
work during these years. He writes to her almost 
daily and of almost everything from " Iphigenie " to 
sausages. 1 He does nothing without her counsel. 
Under her influence the old love of unfettered nature, 
of storm and stress, yields to a more conservative 
regard for law and custom. " Iphigenie " and " Wil- 
helm Meister " occupy the moments that he can 
snatch from administrative duties; but in the new 
flux of his mind neither can come to a satisfactory 
solution. And now, ever alert to put his own expe- 
riences into literary form, he found in the imprudent 
love of Tasso for a lady at the court of Ferrara an 
episode that suggested a possible catastrophe to his 
own situation, and this poet's tragedy became " bone of 
his bone and flesh of his flesh," as he told Eckermann, 
during the entire duration of their relation, which 
however furthering it might be in some directions 

1 The letters were first published in 1848. Hers to him she pru- 
dently demanded and destroyed. His are best edited in the new Wei- 
mar edition. To give an idea of the frequency of the correspondence 
I have counted his letters for July-December, 1782. There are 135 
dated, and 127 that bear no date many of which seem to belong to 
this period. 



140 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



was in others obviously unnatural and unhealthy. 
Love cannot live on alms ; what might have been en- 
durable to a youth would seem humiliating to a man 
of high position, now ennobled and verging toward 
forty ; he had got from her what she had to give 
him, and the instinctive impulse that had led him 
from Friederike and from Lotte, no doubt contrib- 
uted 1 to the restlessness that made him look to Italy 
as a haven that he must reach at whatever cost, to 
save his genius. But before following him there it 
will be well to turn for a moment to a field of his 
literary activity that belongs peculiarly to this early 
period, — his lyric poetry. 

It was almost wholly before his visit to Italy that 
Goethe wrote those lyrics which have given him in 
the popular estimation his high place — if it were not 
for Heine we might say his pre-eminent place — in 
this, the most popular, though not the highest, depart- 
ment of literature. Before his day, a truly national 
lyric poetry might have seemed well-nigh moribund. 
The poetic schools connected with the cities of Halle, 
Berlin, and Leipzig were essentially and even pro- 
fessedly artificial, and Klopstock's Odes could not 
hide their emptiness beneath their mock solemnity. 
The popular lyric existed unnoticed, a flower that had 
blushed unseen for generations till Herder discovered 
it. Goethe made Herder's discovery completely his 
own, and in this spirit his best lyrics were conceived 
and executed, the greater part of them before his 

1 Thomas, in his introduction to "Tasso," thinks this influence 
a " myth." 



THE YOUNG GOETHE. 



141 



coming to Weimar, and during his first decade 
there. 

The spontaneity of these songs is their chief charm. 
Without exception, they seem to have their origin in 
events and experiences of the poet's life, though the 
arraDgement that he has given them in his works, by 
masking all chronology, makes it difficult to discover 
the immediate cause of some of them. Still, it is the 
chief episodes in his life that evoke the deepest lyrical 
tones, and the songs that refer to Friederike, 1 to Lili, 2 , 
and to Frau von Stein 3 embrace the greater part of the 
gems of this early period. His friendship with 
Karl August, his Swiss journey, and a few ballads 
founded on tradition or on the events of the day, fur- 
nish the themes of nearly all the rest of the lyrics 
that have earned general popularity. 4 The songs of 

1 To her refer, among other poems: "Es schlug mein Herz, 
geschwind zu Pferde ; " " Hand in Hand ! nnd Lipp' auf Lippe ; " 
" Kleine Blumen, kleine Blatter ; " and " Wie herrlich leuchtet Mir 
die Natur." 

2 To her uefer, among other poems : " Neue Liebe, neues Leben; " 
"Anf demSee; " " Lili's Park ; " " Das Veilchen ; " " Das Heideros- 
lein; " " Der Konig in Thule." 

3 To Frau von Stein are directly due : " Rastlose Liebe ; " 
" Wandrers ISTachtlied ; " " Ein Gleiches ; " Liebesbediirfniss ; " 
" Der Beeher ; " " Nachtgedanken ; " " Feme ; " " An Lida ; " 
" Versuchung ; " " Warming ; " many epigrams, and the " Zueig- 
nung," originally intended for his " Geheimnisse." 

4 To Karl August we owe : " Einschrankung ;" " Hoffnung ; " 
"Sorge;" " Eigenthum ; " " Seefahrt ; " " Ilrnenan." The won- 
derful "Song of the Spirits over the Waters" was written at the 
Falls of the Staubbach. Among the Ballads of the first Weimar 
period may be named: " Der Erlkonig; " "Der Fischer;" "Das 
Bliimlein wunderschon." 



142 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Mignon in " Wilhelm Meister " were written toward 
the close of this period, and echo his restless longing 
for Italy, whither at last he stole away almost secretly, 
having ordered the affairs of the duchy so that it 
could best bear his absence while in that ancient 
home of art and culture he might gain clearer concep- 
tions of literature and life in the bosom of classical 
antiquity. 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 



143 



CHAPTEE V. 

GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 

The Italian journey marks the mast important epoch 
in the literary and moral development of Goethe. 
By it all his work that follows is separated in its 
inmost character from all that had gone before. Its 
nature is different. In Italy Goethe found at last his 
moral balance, and from his return until his death he 
went on his way among men with the serenity of 
perfect self-possession. 

That land was full of associations for him. From 
his youth it had been a cherished project to make 
the tour which had so deeply impressed his father, 
and it is with an almost solemn feeling of the respon- 
sibility of so great an opportunity for culture that he 
writes of his laborious journey across the Alps and 
of the eagerness with which, when just arrived at 
Verona, he seized " the opportunity of developing his 
capacity of joyful reverence for what is great and 
beautiful." From Verona he went, as most German 
travellers do to-day, to Padua and Venice, where he 
stayed three weeks. But he grew more and more 
impatient, urged his course southward to Ferrara, 
then over the Apennines to Florence. But even here 



144 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



the impetuous traveller would linger but three hours, 
so eager was he to tread the streets of the Eternal 
City. On October 9, 1786, he reached Borne. 

The first weeks were naturally spent in learning to 
know his new home ; but Borne cast her spell over 
him almost from the outset. He found himself more 
clear and composed than he had beeu for a long time, 
it seemed to him that his judgment of the world was 
more true, he felt as though " in the bosom of Abra- 
ham," cured of his mental agitation and "restored to 
the enjoyment of life and so to the enjo}^ment of 
poetry." This change came to him, of course, not 
from the Borne of 1786, but from its artistic treasures ; 
and its immediate result was to nnseal the creative 
poetic stream that had long flowed so scantily. By 
the middle of January, 1787, he w 7 as able to send to 
Weimar his "Iphigenie," which he had turned into 
classical iambics, as a first fruit of the new influences, 
a fruit produced not without trouble, for he calls it 
" a child of his sorrow." It was indeed still far from 
jts present perfection of form. Yet he was sure that 
he was now on the right track, and in spite of the sur- 
prised and doubting voices that came to him from 
Weimar, he determined to do the same service by 
u Tasso," which alone of all his unfinished works he 
took with him on a journey tc Naples and Sicily. 
But here other things attracted his interest, and he 
had accomplished little on it at his return to Borne, 
in June, 1787. 

He remained a whole year in the Eternal City per- 
fecting Iphigenie," bringing " Egmont " and " Tasso " 



goethe's manhood and old age. 145 



to a cluse, and prosecuting zealously his artistic and 
botanical studies. Meantime his character had been 
modified by a new experience, for, following the cus- 
tom of the time and place, he formed an attachment 
for a Roman girl, probably an artist's model. Though 
morally to be reprobated, this connection had evi- 
dently a valuable influence on his character. It 
aided in revealing to him the joy of life, disassociated 
now from the unnatural sentimentalism that had 
characterized his previous relations. He had shaken 
off the strained idealism of Frau von Stein, and had 
become naturalistic amid these classic surroundings. 
All this is reflected wonderfully in the " Eoman 
Elegies," which for him who understands them, are 
as pure as paradise. 1 Life came to have new meaning 
and value to him, and when he left Eome at last, in 
April, 1788, it was with tearful eyes and a promise 
to return, which he was never destined to fulfil. On 
the 18th of June he was again in Weimar. 

Goethe brought with him from Italy an essentially 
altered conception of " Faust," as will appear later, 
and three plays in a more or less complete condition, 
" Iphigenie," " Egmont," and " Tasso ; " which it is 
well to treat together since they have points of sug- 
gestive similarity. The first of these, "Iphigenie," 
was in its earlier form a fruit of Weimar days and 

1 Afterward when Herder went to Eome, Goethe, half mindful 
of his own experience, half willing to tease the sentimental pastor's 
wife, told Frau Herder her husband would never be happy in Eome 
till he fell in love. But Herder saw life from another side only, and 
" Roman Elegies " were incomprehensible and wholly abhorrent to 
him. 

10 



146 



MODERN GEEMAN LITERATURE. 



of his relation to Frau von Stein. Here the mind- 
tossed Orestes recovers " clearness " again in his 
sister's angelic presence, as Goethe imagined he would 
do in the platonic affection of the baroness. Classi- 
cal ideas had little to do with the first conception. 
Metastases operas probably suggested the form of 
the drama, and the germ of the idea dated back to 
1776, when he had been requested to write a cantata 
in memory of the death of the daughter of the com- 
poser Gluck, who was associated with this subject by 
the music he had composed for Racine's tragedy, 
" Iphigenie en Aulis " 1 two years before. 

If in this play Greek and barbarian are brought to- 
gether it is not yet with the symbolic purpose of the 
" Helena " in " Faust." Indeed the ethical position 
here is more artificially youthful, more strained than 
it would have been had the plan been less complete 
when the poet broke the " icy chains " that bound him 
to Weimar. " Iphigenie " is indeed a beautiful, bright 
picture of calm, pure womanhood ; but she awakens 
dramatic interest almost solely by her effort and fail- 
ure to lie with a straight face. She is too upright 
for the part she has undertaken to play, although in 
the drama it is her straightforwardness that finally 
frees her brother and reconciles Greek and barbarian. 

But the play not only lacks action, its ethical ideals 
are unripe and unnatural. A comparison, from this 
standpoint, of Orestes, who for a very pardonable 
crime wastes his youth in self-torture and penitential 
labors imposed by an oracle, and who finds his repose 

1 Grimm, Vorlesungen iiber Goethe, ii. 28. 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 147 



from the furies at last in dreams of the nether world 
and sentimental contemplation of his sister's virtues 
(Act iii. sc. 2, 3), with Faust, who, though ten times 
more guilty than Orestes, wastes no strength in vain 
regrets, but rises " on the stepping-stones of his dead 
self to higher things," — this contrast will show the 
gulf that separates the Goethe of Frau von Stein from 
the Goethe of Christiane Vulpius. 

But while ethically "Iphigenie" thus represents 
the old position, in its form it represents the new. It 
had been composed in prose during 1779. Now, in 
"L787, it was put into the most exquisite verses, as 
the image of Frau von Stein yielded to the spirit of 
classic repose and beauty, — a spirit so foreign to his 
contemporaries at Weimar, or even at Eome, that 
Angelica Kaufmann was almost the only one who 
from the first apprehended its true value and literary 
place. It was fortunate that Goethe had w 7 on in 
Eome self-confidence and critical repose, for a tem- 
porary lack of appreciation for his work now be- 
came almost the rule. He was always in advance of 
his public and of his critics. But from this time he 
was always sure that he had in himself more than he 
could learn from them, and he had no literary mis- 
givings. Still "Iphigenie" did not wholly satisfy 
him in his later years ; and this is not surprising. 
It had, indeed, its natural place in his literary devel- 
opment ; but it was essentially earlier work made 
over, and it could not be made over into harmony 
with the spirit that he had brought back with him 
from Italy. 



148 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



This same discord is observable in a still greater 
degree in "Egmont," whose hero Hermann Grimm 
calls " the weak (weichlich) aristocratic twin-brother 
of Gotz." It appeared at a time when, thanks to the 
latter play, the German public had learned to follow 
new stars. The work suffers from having been too 
long in the writing. It was conceived in Frankfort 
days. Had it been published then it would doubtless 
have been more at one with itself than it proved to 
be when new modes of thought were set to revive the 
old conceptions. It has not " Iphigenie's " classic 
grace of form to commend it. Thus it belongs fun- 
damentally in its art as in its ethics to the time of 
its inception, so that its best characters, Egmont and 
Clarchen, appeal far more to the romantic instinct 
than to the reason. The historical Egmont, as Goethe 
said later, was not calculated to rouse enthusiasm, but 
his own creation is hardly more successful. His Eg- 
mont sacrifices himself for ideals of political freedom, 
in the spirit of Gotz, but the populace are represented 
as more amenable to demagogy than to patriotism, 
and so appear unworthy of the sacrifice, which there- 
fore fails to excite our sympathy. 

" Tasso " has more unity of conception and execu- 
tion than " Egmont," but it is almost wholly lacking 
in dramatic action, and would hardly be tolerated in 
the theatre by a less patient public than the German. 
It was first printed in 1790 ; but it was not put on 
the stage till 1808. Indeed, it is essentially not a 
drama, but a study of character in dramatic form, 
and as such it must be judged. In its pre-Italian 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 149 



condition it embraced two acts in prose written in 
1780 and 1781, composed, as he w 7 rote to Frau von 
Stein, " while he was worshipping her." But it w 7 as 
not till his relation with her was severed at least by 
distance, that he carried the work further, and, as 
was usual with him, sought an objective stand-point 
for it. He gave a side of his experience literary 
form, though, as in " Werther," the culmination of 
the tragic situation was suggested by an *act of his 
former friend Lenz under similar conditions. Ethi- 
cally, then, " Tasso " was a product of unrest, of a 
time which he speaks of as " a terrible disease," 
when he was "caught in a snare." In that sense 
" Tasso " was " bone of his bone and flesh of his 
flesh," while it was equally true that " he could hardly 
tell what idea he had tried to put in it," because 
when he conceived it he had not yet " come to clear- 
ness," to borrow an expression from his " Faust." 

The chief value of " Tasso," as it took shape in 
Italy and during the two years that followed his re- 
turn, is in its form. The situation had ceased to have 
any living interest or actuality for him, and his con- 
structive imagination flagged. Form had, however, 
won for him an intrinsic interest, and he seems to 
have been bent on giving to the drama the highest 
development in this direction. Metrically the iam- 
bics of " Tasso " are the nearest approach to perfection 
in the language ; indeed, their very perfection was felt 
by Schlegel to be a fault, their melodious, long-con- 
tinued, wavy motion being, in spite of their elegance 
and perfect melody, unsuited to dramatic dialogue. 



150 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



A noteworthy change in the ethics of the drama 
had been produced, however, by his Italian experi- 
ence. In February, 1788, he writes to a friend, " I 
cannot let ' Tasso ' end thus," which means 1 that 
Tasso must neither appear justified, as he had per- 
haps at first intended, nor wholly humiliated, as the 
result of his indiscreet affection for the princess. 
Neither solution will serve for the Goethe of 1788, 
and so the last scene shows Tasso to us " brought to 
clearness " by his forced separation from his hopeless 
love, saved morally by the rock on which the bark of 
his fortunes had been wrecked. Thus " Tasso " ends 
in the spirit of " Faust." It may be noted in passing 
that the relations of the Italian poet to the court of 
Ferrara gave Goethe a welcome opportunity for grate- 
ful praise of his own patron, Karl August. 

These three dramas are all conceived in an earlier, 
and executed in a later spirit. The first homogene- 
ous work of the new Goethe was the " Boman Elegies," 
which were begun soon after his return to Weimar. 
These, as has been already said, reflect a more frank 
and naive realism in his view of the senses and their 
gratification than accorded with the views of Frau 
von Stein, or the current ascetic professions of Ger- 
man society, which indeed reached no further than 
theoretic counsels of perfection ; and what was impor- 
tant for his whole future career, he proceeded to put 
the spirit of the "Eoman Elegies " into action in his 
own life, with a calm indifference to social prejudices 
that must have seemed quite incomprehensible to 
1 Thomas : Goethe's "Tasso." Introd., p. 1 seq. 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 



151 



those court circles, "imperfectly monogamous" as 
they are said to have been, who thought of him as a 
parvenu. 

When Goethe returned to Weimar, in 1788, he 
wished to found a home. He was almost forty, and 
lie felt that such relations would foster the calm de- 
velopment of his rearroused genius. But he knew 
enough of the ladies of his own rank at Weimar to 
see that in them social conventions had killed freedom. 
It was not among these that he could find the fresh, 
sober, healthy common-sense he sought, Philistia 
should not triumph over him whom Eome had set 
free. Intellectual companionship he could not have 
found in Germany; it was sympathy and love he 
needed and desired, and his heart found the fulness 
of its satisfaction in Christiane Yulpius, a Weimar 
maiden of lower social sphere, whom he took to his 
home in the summer of 1788 and always regarded 
as his wife, though they were not formally married 
till 1806, under press of danger from the French 
conquest. 

If we are to listen to Weimar gossip " Mamzell' 
Vulpius " was a sort of cook, and somewhat addicted 
to drink. Goethe had been able to silence the oppo- 
sition of his political opponents at court, but slander- 
ous tongues of envious women were not so easily put 
to shame. Indeed his true relations to Christiane 
could hardly be justly apprehended before the publi- 
cation of his correspondence with her, which even 
now is only partial. The original letters are con- 
tained in a series of portfolios labelled " Letters from 



152 



MODERN 



GERMAN 



LITERATURE. 



me to my wife," and at the beginning is placed that 
exquisite poem, — 

" Ich gieng ira Walde, 
So i'vir mich bin," 

called in his works " Found," hut here "Frau von 
Goethe." The letters already printed breathe the 
tenderest spirit. They know nothing of the base al- 
legations of Weimar scandal-mongers. They show 
only that lie loved her, and found in her the true and 
faithful help-meet of all his after life. " I live," he 
writes at this time, " and though centuries and cen- 
turies were granted to man, I would have to-morrow 
be as to-day." He calls her " dear angel," " dear 
heart," " my little one," with that touch of natural 
simplicity that makes the great thinker kin to the 
simple burgher girl ; and again he tells a friend that 
"he had walked on the shore, looking for sea-shells ; 
but in one of them he had found a pearl that he 
guarded close to his heart." The " Roman Elegies " 
are his epithalamium to his bride, the most antique 
of modern poetry, quite in the spirit, as he himself 
says, of Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, whom per- 
haps they surpass. Other poems among the most 
beautiful of Goethe's work are written of his love for 
her and of his grief at her death (1816), after their 
wedded life of nearly thirty years. From the first, 
his mother, who knew him best and loved him un- 
selfishly, welcomed her as " her daughter," and in the 
dark days that followed Jena she proved worthy of 
her husband, and at the risk of her own life preserved 
him and his house from plunderers. 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 153 



While it is greatly to be regretted, for his sake and 
for the sake of his good name, that Goethe did not 
take immediately the step that he took finally, that 
lie did not by a public marriage conform to a social 
law, whatever might have been his views of his moral 
obligations, yet it should be remembered that the 
prevailing standard of his time was lax in this par- 
ticular, and that it probably never entered his mind 
that he was wronging Christiane's moral nature or his 
own. For these social ethics Goethe cannot be made 
wholly responsible ; but of the act that sprang from 
them, what more need be said than that since he 
never repented of his choice, there is no reason that 
his biographers should do it for him ? 

One of the results of Goethe's attachment for Chris- 
tiane was to make clear to him the essential unhealthi- 
ness of his relation to Frau von Stein ; and it is not 
difficult to trace in his letters to her the widening of 
the breach, until in 1789 (June 1st), he reads her 
quite a lecture on what now seems to him her officious 
meddling in his affairs, and their correspondence 
ceases till she is ready to resume it on the new 
footing. No doubt the breaking of a relation so pro- 
longed, so intimate, and once so fruitful, caused him 
much regret and also a temporary loss of social popu- 
larity in Weimar ; but he had outgrown both her and 
the Weimar circle, and could stand unmoved without 
them. He was now to suffer also a partial eclipse of 
his literary pre-eminence in popular favor, for he who 
had led his countrymen in " Gotz " and " Werther " 
had passed beyond them. He could feel but little 



154 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



sympathy for the spirits he had conjured up to riot 
in such chivalrous romances as Vulpius's " Einaldo 
Einaldini " and plays like Schiller's " Bauber," and 
they could feel still less for his deepened aesthetic in- 
sight. So, now that he was relieved from pressing 
cares of state by the generosity of Karl August, he 
turned more and more to scientific studies, which 
were to occupy so large a part in the next forty years 
of his life that, though such studies have no direct 
connection with literature, it is not unfitting to indi- 
cate here, with all brevity, what Goethe did for 
modern science, — a field in which few but specialists 
rightly estimate his services. 

It was in 1784 that Goethe discovered in the hu- 
man skeleton the undeveloped intermaxillary bone, 
which in lower animals is more easily distinguishable 
from the two bones of the upper jaw. The discovery 
was valuable in itself, but the method of investigation 
that he employed inaugurated the science of Com- 
parative Anatomy. So, too, his essay on the Mor- 
phology of Plants, which traced all parts of the 
flower to modifications of the leaf, made him in 
botany as well as in zoology, " the tender father " of 
a new-born science. 1 He made experiments of much 
value in optics, also, though his theory of colors de- 
rived from them was fundamentally false. He was, 
too, the first to perceive clearly the vertebrate char- 
acter of the human skull, — a view now generally 
accepted, though with some modifications. In short, 

1 The epithet is from Von Eseubeck, the noted botanist, cited 
in Lewes' " Life of Goethe." 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 155 



as Helmliolz has said, in science Goethe's great mind 
found a field adapted to it at a time that was pecu- 
liarly favorable, for material enough had been gath- 
ered both in botany and comparative anatomy to 
allow a clear survey of these subjects to be taken ; 
and while his contemporaries were all wandering 
without a compass or contenting themselves with a 
dry registration of facts, the poet was able to intro- 
duce into science two ideas of infinite fruitfulness. 1 
However this scientific activity may lie outside the 
field of literature, it belongs to Goethe's greatness as 
an original thinker; for he brought to these studies 
also the clear vision of the seer that had won him 
literary supremacy. German scientists have long 
ungrudgingly recognized their debt to their greatest 
poet. 

The literary productivity, that after the completion 
of "Tasso" had given place for a time to these scien- 
tific avocations, was rearroused in Goethe at last by 
the long delayed friendship between him and Schiller. 
Their acquaintance, which for some years had given 
small promise of blossom, opened suddenly when its 
time was ripe into a perfect flower. The younger poet 
had been living in or near Weimar since 1787. Of 
his earlier life and work this is not the occasion to 
speak. It is sufficient for the present purpose to say 
that it had not been of a character to arouse literary 
confidence iu a man of Goethe's wide relations and 
new Italian experience. Schiller was to be the 
nearest and dearest of Goethe's friends. In him and 

1 Lewes, Goethe, p. 348, cites Helmliolz more fully and literally. 



156 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

in his wife Christiane, Goethe found sympathy and 
appreciation for every side of his nature, such as is 
seldom vouchsafed to the great men of the world. 
But in 1788 it seemed to Goethe that Schiller stood 
in the way of the development of classical taste in 
Germany. Therefore he made no effort to meet the 
young poet, for Schiller was then but twenty-nine, 
and when at last a " chance " that Schiller had care- 
fully calculated, brought them together, he could 
rouse no response in the elder man. Perhaps Goethe's 
relations with the court may have contributed some- 
what to a cold bearing that hurt Schiller's pride, so 
that for a time his admiration for Goethe was tem- 
pered by what seems like jealous carping. It was in 
this mood that he wrote a review of " Egmont " that 
provoked Goethe to the rash remark that Schiller 
" might be right about the political wisdom now 
ruling in Germany, but as for its poetry he under- 
stood nothing at all about it." And yet Goethe was 
quite willing magnanimously to overlook the aliena- 
tion of Schiller ; he saw his worth and obtained for 
him a professorship at Jena, foreseeing, perhaps, that 
this would do much to clarify his aesthetic ideas ; but 
he still ignored him personally, and Schiller felt this 
bitterly. For even in 1789 he had more in common 
with Goethe than had any other man in Germany. 
In the five years that followed, while Goethe sat in 
solitary grandeur, Schiller was ever drawing nearer to 
him. It was a strange irony that kept them" so long 
asunder. 

Goethe's life during these years was, however, full 



goethe's manhood and old age. 



157 



of^ domestic joys and rich experience. On Christmas 
Day, 1789, Christiane bore him his first son, and he re- 
organized his household as befitted her added dignity 
of motherhood. This and the distant thunder of the 
French Revolution led him to defer a second visit to 
Italy, but he went to Venice in 1790 to meet the 
Duchess Amalie there. The literary precipitate of 
this journey, the " Venetian Epigrams," is peculiarly 
interesting, because it shows that his marriage had 
helped him to a calmer judgment of Italian culture 
than had characterized the " Eoman Elegies." In 
general the content of his domestic life fostered a 
lighter vein, and he had begun to turn his attention 
once more to " Wilhelm Meister " and to the Court 
Theatre, when the summer of 1792 saw the duchy of 
Weimar involved in the disastrous invasion of France 
that culminated in the defeat of the Duke of Bruns- 
wick at Valmy. Karl August commanded a regiment 
of the invaders, and had summoned Goethe to join 
him at Longwy in September. He remained about 
six weeks with the troops, and was an eye-witness 
of the bungling incompetence that cost Germany 
30,000 men. Goethe's impressions are recorded in 
Jus " Campaign in France," a most interesting account 
of war as seen with every advantage by one who has 
no pronounced sympathies with either cause ; for 
Goethe, though he " preferred injustice to disorder," 
as he said later at the siege of Mayence (1793), had 
never identified " country " with "prince " or " form 
of government," nor suffered his patriotism to cloud 
the serenity of his judgment. 



158 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



When Goethe returned to Weimar it was to find 
the house now inseparably connected with his name 
nearly ready for occupancy. It was a gift from the 
duke, and was palatial according to the standard of 
Weimar, though the rooms intended for the private 
use of himself and family were furnished with the 
most austere simplicity, as any who visit them to-day 
may see, for they are in the same condition now as 
when Goethe died. Full of the happiness of this 
new home, his work reflected what he felt in the 
healthy humor of "Reineke Fuchs," which he " took 
about with him," as he was accustomed to say, during 
1793, and published in 1794. 

"Reineke Fuchs" had been a popular form of 
animal fable turned to the purposes of satire since 
the tenth century. The kernel of it is in iEsop and 
can indeed be traced to India. The principal figure 
is the Fox, whose cunning enables him to use the 
power of the Lion to avenge himself on the brute 
force of the Wolf. By endless trickery he involves 
his enemies in the snares they have laid for him, and 
comes at last to an honorable old age. In Germany 
the fable appears in Latin about 940, but it received 
its best mediaeval treatment about 1250 from a 
Flemish poet, Willem, whose work forms the basis 
of all future versions of the story, as it does of 
Goethe's delightful comic epic. Without local or 
personal allusions, he has made the whole a social 
and political satire of great vigor, ease, and humor, 
so that though it is not one of his deepest works, and 
was strangely neglected at the time of its appearance, 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 159 

this humorous apotheosis of impudence has become, 
and is likely to remain, one of Goethe's most popular 
poems. Quotations from it aucl allusions to its situa- 
tions are more universally recognized in Germany 
than would be the case with anything he wrote if we 
except " Hermann und Dorothea " and the Gretchen 
episode in "Faust." 

And now, in 1794, Goethe and Schiller were at 
last to meet and understand one another. Schiller's 
lon^-cherished ambition was to be realized. He was 
to make Goethe feel that he, and he alone, could 
comprehend him. And when once this slow work 
was done, Goethe was first to speak of friendship, 
first to enter the house of his new-found intellectual 
brother. But as soon as he had learned to know him 
he felt he could not spare him from his life. His 
visits to Jena became more frequent and more pro- 
longed. Schiller, too, made frequent visits to Wei- 
mar, and at last, in 1799, it was made possible for 
him to exchange his professorship at Jena for a house 
close to that of Goethe in Weimar, and their inter- 
course became unbroken till Schiller's early death. 

The effect of this friendship was great on both 
men, though the lesser naturally gained from it more 
than the greater, and the realist had less need of an 
outside influence than the idealist. Both were one, 
however, in their belief in culture and art as potent 
influences for the elevation of humanity. In this 
spirit for three years (1795-1797) they made Schiller's 
periodical, " Die Horen," a means of impressing their 
common purpose on Germany at a time of intense 



160 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



political and social fermentation. In it were pub- 
lished, together with many shoiter pieces, the 
" Eonian Elegies " and the concluding portion of 
" Wilhelm Meister." But Schiller's ideal enthusiasm 
aimed too high. He was obliged to abandon the 
journal ; but they continued to attack the armies of 
Philistia through the " Musenalmanach " in stinging 
" Xenien," which scourged the aberrations of popular 
taste with the keenness of Martial's epigrams, and 
spread consternation in the ranks of their old friends 
of the " storm and stress," for though far less severe 
than the "Dunciad" or the "English Bards and 
Scotch Reviewers," these blows, fell on writers less 
accustomed than the English to slashing criticism. 
They aroused indescribable excitement and life-long 
enmities. 

In his serene old age Goethe remembered with re- 
gret these joint productions. "What time I have 
wasted witli Schiller on the ' Horen ' and the ' Musen- 
almanach,'" he said to Eckermann (Dec. 3, 1824). 
" I cannot look back without dissatisfaction on those 
undertakings in which the world misused us, while 
the work was quite without result for ourselves." 
He did not realize then that he had needed Schiller 
at all, and indeed it was less that Schiller gave him 
anything than that he roused his latent creative 
power. Through him Goethe learned, as he said, "to 
command poetry," as appears especially in the new 
lyrics and ballads, and to place himself above moods, 
so that he now worked more as a conscious artist in 
metres, which does not seem to have been always, 



goethe's manhood and old age. 



161 



nor wholly, to his advantage. There were moments 
when in daily aesthetic intercourse with Schiller he 
seemed in danger of losing his realistic footing. But 
however we estimate its effect, Schiller's friendship 
was a great happiness to him, and it is interesting to 
hear this brother poet, who knew Goethe better than 
any other man, say that " he never for one moment 
doubted his character." " There is," so he writes, in 
1800, to Countess Schimmelmann, "a high sincerity 
and sterling worth in his nature, and the loftiest zeal 
for the right and good." Nor could the great aver- 
sion of Schiller's romantic wife for Christiane avail to 
trouble the course of the friendship of the husbands. 

The first important work of Goethe that grew under 
this new influence to ripeness was " Wilhelm Meister." 
Of this novel Schiller had a very exalted estimate, 
though it would seem to be the general opinion that 
the book suffered artistically from the alterations 
made at his suggestion. " I count it one of the most 
fortunate incidents of my life," he wrote, " that I have 
lived to see this work completed ; that it has been 
finished while my faculties are yet capable of impres- 
sions, so that I can still draw from the pure spring. 
I cannot tell you how deeply the truth, the inner 
vitality, the simple fulness, of this book has affected 
me. Tranquil and deep, clear and yet, like nature, 
incomprehensible is this work where all, even the 
most trifling things, show the clearness and balance 
of the mind whence they flowed." 

"Wilhelm Meister" has no definite plot, but is 
rather the unfolding of characters from various 

11 



162 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



spheres of life, some of them quite classical in their 
delicate delineation. The " apprentice years " of 
William, in whom one recognizes again one of the 
many facets of Goethe's character, lead him among 
actors, through whose art he hopes to gain and give 
culture ; then, as this does not satisfy, the aristocratic 
world opens its doors to him, and we have several 
figures that suggest the court of Weimar. The " Con- 
fessions of a Beautiful Soul " introduce the religious 
element, which Goethe had studied in the society of 
Fraulein von Klettenberg, in early Frankfort days ; 
but it should be noticed that this is allowed to have 
no direct bearing on the action and life of the actors 
in the novel itself, for it is in practical activity that 
William's apprenticeship ends. 

The book was hurried toward the close, and has 
not artistic completeness. But the individual char- 
acters are wonderfully realistic studies, in which the 
noble and the base, good and evil, the gay, fascinat- 
ing, and more than coquettish Philine, the mysterious 
angel purity of Mignon, and the brooding monomania 
of the Harper, are treated with equal care and equal 
objectivity. Nor is any minor character, whether 
among the actors or the aristocracy, neglected. Inci- 
dentally " Wilhelm Meister " contains much ripened 
worldly wisdom and philosophy, It has also at least 
one famous piece of literary and aesthetic criticism, 
the analysis of Hamlet, while Mignon' s songs are 
among the most exquisite of any literature. The 
book has sometimes been called immoral, possibly 
because it was impossible to deny its truth to hu- 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 163 



man nature, so that when the mirror was held up to 
them, people turned away and cried shame at their 
own portraits. " Let the galled jade wince." 

The ballads of this period are somewhat more arti- 
ficial than those that preceded the Roman journey, 
yet the German element gradually reasserts its place 
beside the antique. For while " Alexis and Dora," 
" Pausanias," and " The Bride of Corinth " are essen- 
tially in the category of the " Roman Elegies," the clas- 
sic hexameters, with their objective dignity and calm 
harmony, are turned, in " Hermann and Dorothea," to 
a subject instinct with national life, an epic of the 
German home, a monument to those conservative 
social relations which had been the strength of Ger- 
man nationality since Tacitus' day, and whose full 
significance his marriage had revealed to the poet. 

The story of Dorothea is old in almost every detail, 1 
but Goethe has given it eternal youth, though he has 
made it contemporary with the trials of the French 
Revolution, and the year of its composition (1796- 
1797). The scene is laid on the borderland in the 
Rhine country. The advancing tide of revolution 
has driven emigrants from the West into the still 
peaceful districts that had as yet heard only distant 
echoes of the " rights of man." Thus beneath an ap- 
parently simple story we have the contrast of two 
great impulses of human nature, the migratory desire 
of change, the restless, reforming, iconoclastic spirit, 
and the slow, conservative, accretive mind that feels 

1 Hewitt, "Hermann und Dorothea," gives the original text of 
the year 1732. There is a translation of it in Thomas's edition. 



164 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

an instinctive dread of change, as though it were like 
a tree that cannot be transplanted without losing some 
increment of growth. The best fruit of each of these 
social conditions Goethe will unite in the marriage of 
his Hermann and his Dorothea. 

Critics have called "Hermann and Dorothea" a 
" Hymn to the Family," " a masterpiece of studied ♦ 
realism," " the pearl of Germany's art." As in " Wil- 
helrn Meister," there is no idealization. Even the 
minor characters are studied from life. The host and 
hostess of the Golden Lion suggest Goethe's own 
parents, and much in Hermann came from introspec- 
tive study. There is none of the sentimentality of 
" Werther," nor yet of the idealized type, as in " Iphi- 
genie." Dorothea's energetic independence in disaster 
is the natural result in a noble mind of those ideas 
of social freedom that caused the disasters themselves. 
What produced the Eevolution produced the mind to 
endure it. Such use of types as this is quite distinct 
from the use made in those earlier works. And 
there is change also in his social ethics. Goethe's 
sympathy is now with a conservative patriotism, 
where the wife arms the husband to defend the home 
that all may enjoy peace. This accorded entirely 
with the popular spirit. " Hermann and Dorothea " 
won immediate and immense success, that endures 
undiminished to this day. 

The next important work undertaken by Goethe 
was the furthering of "Faust," but sickness and 
public cares checked its progress so that the first part 
was not printed till 1808, and the second not till after 



goethe's manhood and old age. 165 

his death (1832). An attempted continuation of the 
" Iliad," the " Achilleis," and a strong realistic drama, 
" Die Naturliche Tochter," belong also to this period. 
Socially, Goethe seems to have been much isolated, 
at least up to 1802, when the sympathy shown for 
him in a serious illness perhaps induced him to lower 
a little the " wall," as lie called it, that he had raised 
around himself. Hence the deaths of Gleim, Klop- 
stock, and Herder, in 1803, would affect him but 
little; but the death of Schiller, in 1805, struck a 
blow that was the more deeply felt because there was 
none to take his place. And this shock was followed 
by the battle of Jena, which threatened the annihila- 
tion of the Duchy and the destruction of the fruit of his 
public life, though happily these fears were not real- 
ized. Two years later, in 1808, his mother died also. 

The French conquest was the cause of Goethe's 
formal marriage, and by a strange coincidence when 
their army occupied Weimar, it was the son of his old 
fiancee, Lili, who brought him a note of protection 
from violence that Christiane had gallantly risked her 
own safety to avert. Karl August's position seemed 
for the moment imperilled, for Napoleon was angry 
that he had assisted wounded Prussian officers. 
Goethe defended the duke to the French commander 
warmly and at some risk, for though usually a calm 
spectator of events, he was now greatly agitated and 
excited. In his exasperation, Falk reports that he said 
to him : " I tell you the duke ought to act and must 
act as he does ; . . . though he should lose country 
and subjects, crown and sceptre, he must not deviate 



166 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



one Lair's breadth." If the duke were driven from 
Weimar, Goethe said he would follow him and sing 
his wrongs all over Germany, " and the children shall 
learn the song of their shame till they are men, and 
then they shall sing my master on to his throne again 
and yours off his." It was rare that Goethe allowed 
himself to show so much interest in politics ; but it 
will be observed that it is the moral aspect, and not 
the political, that claims his sympathy. 

In 1808, as the French hegemony was being appar- 
ently established at Erfurt, Goethe was brought into 
frequent contact with Napoleon, who had great admi- 
ration for his genius and no reason to complain of his 
politics. This, too, is the period of his most intimate 
intercourse with Bettina Brentano, whose inordinate 
vanity and a certain childishness of demonstrative 
affection finally made Goethe insist on suspending 
relations that had lono- been wearisome. She might 
be amusing and ardent, she certainly was enthusiastic, 
but her "Correspondence of Goethe with a Child " is 
little more than a romance in which she attributes to 
herself poems addressed to others, and after turning 
his verses into her letters, accuses the poet of using 
her letters for his verses. Bettina's admiration did 
not extend to Christiane. and, as one cannot be inti- 
mate with a lady who calls one's wife a " blood- 
pudding " in one's own house, his door was closed to 
Bettina after 1811. 

Two years before this, Goethe had finished the 
" Elective Affinities," one of his keenest psychologi- 
cal studies, and in 1811 he had prepared the first 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 167 



two volumes of an autobiography suggestively called 
"Fiction and Truth." He had begun work, too, on 
a continuation of " Wilhelm Meister," but till the 
Napoleonic period was over Germany was too agi- 
tated to have much thought for literature, and neither 
the autobiography nor the novel were appreciated as 
they have since come to be. 

The " Elective Affinities " may be regarded as the 
literary precipitate of the long years of Goethe's re- 
lation to Frau von Stein, with whom he was now at 
peace again. It is a conflict of passion and duty, which 
here is brought to a tragic close. The book, like 
"Wilhelm Meister," has been called immoral. It is 
neither moral nor immoral ; it is a dispassionate study 
of human nature, — a thing unfortunately incompre- 
hensible to some of Philistia's most worthy citizens. 
In the two men of the book, Edward and the Captain, 
the attentive reader will recognize two sides of Goethe's 
own nature and experience : on the one hand, the 
sudden impulse of the imagination that led him to 
form such attachments as that for Frau von Stein ; on 
the other, the calmer reason that always came to his 
aid at the critical points of his life, that prudence that 
had carried him away in time from Friederike, from 
Lotte, from Lili, and from Charlotte. So, too, in the 
women of the novel. Charlotte, as in real life, is 
cool, self-controlled ; Ottilie is a creature of impulse, 
whose conscience is first awakened by the share she 
has in the accidental death of the child of Charlotte 
and Edward, her husband and Ottilie's " affinity," 
while the prudent Captain is the "affinity" of the 



168 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



circumspect Charlotte. Their self-control saves these 
last from the tragedy that befalls the impulsive 
Ottilie and the weak-willed Edward. The purpose 
of the whole and its autobiographical meaning is 
clear. Goethe, while observing the outward com- 
mands of law, had allowed himself before his Italian 
journey to enter into ethical relations with Frau von 
Stein, which seemed impermissible to the riper view 
of moral law and social relations that came to him 
from his marriage and fatherhood. The purpose of 
the "Elective Affinities" is to show that every tam- 
pering with this foundation of society must be de- 
moralizing, though the title shows that Goethe felt 
there was in passion an element of fatalism. This 
complexity has puzzled commentators, who forget that 
Goethe was not creating human hearts, but describing 
them. 

The " Elective Affinities " is a book whose influ- 
ence is much wider than the circle of its readers, for 
it is the starting-point of the psychological novel in 
Germany. It is now but little read, and that little 
chiefly because of the supposed connection of Ottilie 
with Minna Herzlieb, a young girl of Jena to whom the 
aged Goethe was attached, and who naturally rever- 
enced him ; but this is probably idle gossip. In any 
case Ottilie is a most charming tragic- figure, a union 
of modest simplicity and clear knowledge, of humility 
and strength, and for her sake the book became for a 
time almost as popular as "Werther" had been, 
though the story as a whole was probably understood 
by but few in the sense in which Goethe had written 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 169 



it and in which the generation that had passed would 
have received it. 

Of "Wilhelm Meister's AVanderjahre " it may suf- 
fice to say that it is unintelligible to many, and 
dreary reading to most, in spite of some charming 
episodes and wise pedagogic observations. The fun- 
damental teaching of the book is self-denying altruism, 
which was to find a happier expression in the Second 
Part of " Faust." A far higher place is due to " Dich- 
tuug uud Wahrheit," one of the most fascinating au- 
tobiographies in German, or indeed in any language. 
The title shows that we have to do here, not with 
pure history, but with history seen through the long 
vista of years and under the transforming influence 
of the artist's eye. He tells the story of his life from 
childhood until he entered the court of Weimar 
(1749-1775) ; but his experiences are so modified 
and sometimes rearranged by his poetic fancy as to 
form a more artistically balauced whole than the un- 
embellished annals might have furnished. Not that 
these changes were undertaken with any anxious 
wish to set himself or his acts in a better light before 
the world, but purely in the spirit of the artist, to 
whom his own figure was, like any other, a subject 
for artistic treatment. It has even been claimed that 
Friederike is here painted in fairer tints and the 
young Goethe in darker colors than the unvarnished 
tale would warrant. But whatever interest this and 
a few similar cases may have for the biographer, they 
concern but little the lover of literature, to whom 
" Dichtung und Wahrheit " will ever remain one of 



170 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



the most charming of books and an imperishable 
monument to Friederike and to Lili, as the "Wer- 
ther " is to Lotte Buff. 

With brief intervals Goethe had been director of 
the Court Theatre since his return from Italy; but 
his love of art had made him a very dictatorial one, 
and the position must have brought him much an- 
noyance. He had even been known to send recalci- 
trant actors to the guard-house, and to confine rebel- 
lious actresses with sentinels before their doors. But 
his lofty plans for the stage were impracticable, partly 
because Weimar could not support actors of the first 
class, partly because the public naturally wished to 
be amused rather than instructed for their money, 
and at last, after his labors of a generation, demanded 
the performance of a trained poodle. This was too 
much. Goethe's official connection with the Weimar 
stage ceased with 1817. 

Before this, however, the Battle of Leipzig and the 
fall of Napoleon had taken a load from Germany, and 
this seemed to inspire Goethe with new poetic life ; 
for it is now that he begins to collect poems, almost 
wholly newly written, into a volume of verses in the 
Oriental manner, which he called " Der West-Ostliche 
Divan." As the idea took form in his mind, Goethe, 
though now nearly seventy, began an extended study 
of the Eastern poets, whose exuberance he checked by 
collateral reading of Homer. But in 1815 anxiety 
about his wife's health and his own interrupted his 
studies. He made a trip to the Rhine, where he re- 
newed his youth in the society of Marianne Wille- 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 



171 



mer, to whom most of the poems of " Zuleika " in the 
" Divan " were addressed. The affection expressed 
was of course only gracefully platonic, for Marianne's 
husband was Goethe's host and congenial friend. 

Though written mainly in 1814 and 1815, the 
" Divan" did not appear till 1819. Individual poems 
in it could not but be universally admired, though 
the general tendency was too broad, both in literature 
and politics, to please the Chauvinists of the period. 
It is true the book is essentially national. " The 
East infuses the West only as a rare perfume, without 
altering its nature," 1 and the mask of Oriental form is 
easily lifted ; but when it is lifted it is only to show 
that, to Goethe, the narrow patriotism that would 
close its eyes to what is good in foreign nations, be- 
cause they are foreign, is as hateful in a German as 
in a Frenchman, and as contemptible in literature as 
in social or political life. Still, the foreign form and 
the tendency to oracular mysteriousness in many 
portions has contributed up to the present day to 
narrow the circle of those who treasure " Der West- 
Ostliche Divan." 

In his arcadian holiday by the Rhine Goethe 
gained the strength and spirit to undertake also sev- 
eral studies in Rhenish antiquities. That these essays 
and the "Divan" should have occupied Goethe dur- 
ing the years of the War of Liberation and the great 
crisis of Waterloo has naturally offended the German 
patriots. The fate of Europe was changing before his 
eyes, and Goethe was imitating Hafiz. Hardly a note 
1 Scherer, Deutsche Litteraturgeschichte, p. 657. 



172 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



suggests the great events of these momentous years, 
though they are involved in the " Divan," so far as 
suits the poet's purpose. Thus Ave are brought to 
consider Goethe's political position, not that we may 
apologize for it, but that we may understand it. 

Goethe, like most men of his time, prized individual 
rather than social liberty. No doubt he felt, what 
Dr. Johnson said, that it made very little difference 
under what government he lived so that he could live 
and think in peace. He had no sympathy with ex- 
tremists on either side, least of all with self-made 
rulers, the " political bunglers," whom, as he told 
Eckermaun, " he hated like sin." Hence he was one 
of the few men who during the whole course of the 
French Eevolution never had to change his mind or 
swallow his words. Later lie suffered much from 
war, but he admired Napoleon with the affinity that 
men of great moral force feel for one another. He 
had faith in genius. He did not believe that Napo- 
leon could be conquered, nor did he see any great gain 
to come to him, or to Germany, by that conquest. 
And so he sought relief in studies that might main- 
tain the calm temper of his mind. He has been 
called unpatriotic ; but, as has already been said, 
there was then no German nation, and Goethe prob- 
ably saw small hope of its creation. In standing 
thus aloof from the temporal aspirations of the people, 
he believed he could labor more effectually for their 
intellectual upbuilding. That, he felt, was the first 
necessity. " Do not believe," he said about this time 
to Luden, " that I am indifferent to those great ideals, 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 173 



Freedom, Fatherland, People ; . . . Germany is dear 
to my heart. I have often felt it bitterly that the 
German people, individually so honorable, should be 
so miserable as a whole. To compare them with 
others gives me a pain that I try to escape as I can, 
and in art and science I find an escape. . . . But," he 
added, regretfully, " this is no compensation for the 
proud conviction that one belongs to a great, proud, 
honored and dreaded people." 

Again he said to Eckermann : " How could I take 
up arms without hatred, and how could I hate with- 
out youth ? . . . I have only composed love-songs 
when I loved. Could I write songs of hate without 
hating ? " In the very last years of his life he recurred 
to the subject once more : " Whenever a poet wishes 
to work politically he must attach himself to a party. 
He must bid 'good-bye' to his unprejudiced view, 
and pull over his ears the cap of prejudice and blind 
hate. As man and citizen the poet will love his 
fatherland, but the fatherland of his poetic strength 
and his poetic activity is the good, noble, and beauti- 
ful, which is confined to no special province or land, 
which he seizes and forms where he finds it. ... If 
a poet has been active all his life long, warring on 
injurious prejudices, putting aside narrow views, clari- 
fying the public mind, purifying its taste, and enno- 
bling its way of thinking and feeling, — what better can 
he do ? How can he be more patriotic ? . . . I know 
very well that all my striving in the eyes of some 
counts for nothing, because I have scorned to mingle 
in party strife. . . . But not a word more of this miser- 



174 MODERN GEEMAN LITERATURE. 



able subject, that I may not become foolish in my 
struggle against folly." (March, 1832). These words 
may explain why Goethe wrote no battle-cries or 
war-songs, but rather the graceful lyrics, foreign and 
yet German, of the " Divan," with their varying 
themes of mirth, gayety, sadness, and love, and the 
wisdom of old experience brooding over all. 1 

The "Divan" was the last work of Goethe's long 
married life. Christiane died in 1816. The blow was 
a terrible one to him, and yet he did not sink beneath 
it, though what remained to him of his old age 
seemed to him but time granted " that he might 
mourn her loss," as he beautifully said in lines 
written after her burial. It was the downhill of life. 
Men might not have looked for great things from the 
sixteen years that remained, but they were to yield 
much that could ill be spared, and they form a dig- 
nified and worthy close to his full and rich career. 

He regarded these as his "testamentary years." 
To Germany he seemed like a survival of an heroic 
age. All minds looked reverently to Weimar. It 
was the goal of pilgrimage to men of most varied 
minds and nations. Thither came Lotte Kestner, 
now a widow of sixty (1816), with her daughter 
Clara, whose letters during her stay in Weimar 

1 Eekermann's Conversations contain a number of striking pas- 
sages on politics. Especially noteworthy are those under the dates: 
February 25, 1824, July 9, 1827, April 7, 1829 (on Ireland), Feb- 
ruary 18, 1831, March 21, 1831, March, 1832 (" Einige Tage 
spater") ; and in the Supplementary Volume, January 4, 1824, 
and March 14, 1830. The passages cited above occur in March 14, 
1830, and March, 1832. 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 



175 



amusingly betray her wounded vanity. 1 Here, too, 
came the young Heine, who was to carry the torch 
of lyric poetry, that he caught from Goethe's drooping 
hand, through the middle of the century. Princes 
and statesmen were among the visitors. And among 
them, too, was a boy afterward destined to a noble 
name in English letters, — William Makepeace 
Thackeray, then a student at Weimar. A letter, 
which he wrote years afterward to Goethe's biographer, 
Lewes, gives a picture of dignified old age that one 
would not willingly lose. He writes : — 

" In 1831, though he had retired from the world, 
Goethe would, nevertheless, very kindly receive 
strangers. His daughter-in-law's tea-table was al- 
ways spread for us. . . . My delight in those days 
was to make caricatures for children. ... I was 
touched to find that they had been remembered, and 
very proud to be told, as a lad, that the great Goethe 
had looked at some of them. He remained in his 
private apartments, where only a very few privileged 
persons were admitted. ... Of course I remember 
very well the perturbation of spirit with which as a 
lad of nineteen I received the long-expected intima- 
tion that the Herr Geheimrath would see me on such 
a morning. This notable audience took place in a 
little antechamber of his private apartments, covered 
all round with antique casts and bas-reliefs. He was 
habited in a long gray or drab redingot, with a white 
neck-cloth and a red ribbon in his button-hole. He 
kept his hands behind his back, just as in Ranch's 
1 See "Journal des Debats" (ed. Hebdom.), May 26, 1894. 



176 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



statuette. His complexion was very bright, clear, and 
rosy ; his eyes extraordinarily dark, piercing, and 
brilliant. I felt quite afraid before them. ... I 
fancy Goethe must have been still more handsome 
as an old man than even in the days of his youth. 
His voice was very rich and sweet. ... I can fancy 
nothing more serene, majestic, and healthy-looking 
than the grand old Goethe." And after a few words 
about the Weimar court, Thackeray concludes : " With 
a five-and-twenty years experience since those happy 
days of which I write, and an acquaintance with an 
immense variety of human kind, I think I have never 
seen a society more simple, charitable, courteous, 
gentlemanlike, than that of the dear little Saxon city 
where the good Schiller and the great Goethe lived 
and lie buried." 

During these last years, as his health, now some- 
what shaken, permitted, Goethe worked on the " An- 
nals" of his life at Weimar, on the continuation of 
" Wilhelm Meister " and " Faust," and on a complete 
and final edition of his works for which he was paid 
the then unheard-of price of sixty thousand thalers in 
cash with the prospect of as much more should forty 
thousand copies be sold in twelve years. It was a 
great task, for forty volumes were required for the 
literary portion alone. 

After his wife's death he travelled little, seldom 
further than Jena. He loved especially to revisit spots 
associated with his prime. " You hardly know what 
a remarkable place you sit in," he said one day to 
Eckermann at Jena ; " it was here that Schiller lived. 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 177 



In this arbor, on these seats, we have often sat at this 
old stone table and have exchanged many a good and 
great word. He was in the thirties then, I in the 
forties, both full of enthusiasm. That has all passed, 
and I am not what I was. But the old earth remains 
still, and air, and water, and land are still the same." 
The table is standing yet, and an inscription now 
reminds the visitor of these venerable associations. 

In 1828 Karl August died. "Together till our 
last breath," had been his words, as Goethe greeted 
him three years before at the jubilee of his accession. 
And now the titan was left quite alone, reaching out 
into a generation that was no longer his. " I had 
thought to go before him," he said ; " but God disposes 
as he sees best, and nothing remains for us poor mor- 
tals but to endure and stand erect as well as we can." 
Naturally in these last years his thoughts turned 
much to the problems of religion. Like Lessing, he 
called himself, and was, a thorough protestant ; but 
it was not at all the Protestantism of Luther or of 
the Churches. He claimed the right to hold his 
being free from all prescribed dogmas, the right to 
develop his own religious nature. It was his belief 
that " we shall all gradually advance from a Chris- 
tianity of words and faith to a Christianity of feeling 
and action." In this he was, like Lessing, under the 
dominance of the eighteenth century. Positive the- 
ology was foreign to him even in the solemn trials of 
these closing years. 1 

1 Eckermann gives some striking conversations on this subject, 
e. g., March 11, 1832, February 23, 1831, September 1, 1829, Feb- 
ruary 4, 1829, March 2, 1824, February 25, 1824, January 4, 1824. 

12 



178 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

The death of Karl August left Goethe still a son 
to connect him with the past ; but he, too, died sud- 
denly in Eome, in 1830. He had been a wayward 
man and had given his parents much anxiety ; but 
the loss was keenly felt by Goethe and by his 
widowed daughter-in-law, the loving companion of all 
these later years. There is something stoical and 
stately in the words with which Goethe, bowed under 
the weight of his eighty-one years, received the news 
that he was childless. " I was not ignorant that I 
had begotten a mortal," he said ; but his eyes filled 
with tears as he spoke. 

And now, as death drew near, his mind seemed to 
go back with passionate yearnings to old Frankfort 
days and Lili Schonemann, and he devoted himself 
with wonderful energy to this exquisite episode of 
" Dichtung und Wahrheit," for he felt that the lamp 
was flickering. " The individuality is still together, 
and in its senses," he wrote to Eckermann in this 
last year, and a little later, in a letter to Zelter, 
comes the startling cry : " Forward over the graves ! " 
He worked on, comforted by the affectionate care of 
his son's widow, Ottilie, and granting himself little 
unnecessary repose. A year before his death he had 
bought his first arm-chair. But he told Eckermann 
he should use it but little. " All kinds of ease," he 
continued, " are quite foreign to my nature. You see 
no sofa in my room. I always sit in my old wooden 
chair, and it is only within the last few weeks that I 
have had a kind of rest put up for my head. Com- 
fortable, pretty furniture around me paralyzes my 



GOETHE'S MANHOOD AND OLD AGE. 



179 



thoughts and brings me into an easy, passive condi- 
tion." The stern simplicity of his study in the 
" Goethe House," at Weimar, still remains to attest 
his austerity in this regard. 

At last, in August, 1831, the goal of his hopes, the 
Second Part of " Faust," was completed, and appar- 
ently for the first time in all those eighty-two years, 
he felt that his work was over. " The rest of my life 
may be regarded as a free gift," he said. " It is now 
really indifferent what I do, and whether I do any- 
thing at all." 

As his last birthday drew near, he dreaded the fes- 
tivity that would attend it in Weimar, and made the 
journey to Ilmenau, which he had last visited with 
Karl August eighteen years before. It was a natural 
choice, for Ilmenau was associated with the brightest 
days of his Weimar life, now more than half a century 
old. Near Ilmenau is a hill, the Kichelhahn, from 
whose wooded sides one of the loveliest views in all 
this region greets the wanderer. Here in the old 
days a little shelter had been built, and on its wall, 
in 1780, or as others say, in 1783, Goethe had written 
those exquisite lines : — 

" O'er all the hill-tops 
Is quiet now, 
In all the tree-tops 
Hearest thou 

Hardly a breath, 
The birds are asleep in the trees. 
Wait : soon, like these, 

Thou too shalt rest." 

Longfellow, 



180 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



And now he climbed again to that old hut, guarded 
to-day as a precious memorial, and looked once more 
on the same beautiful scene. " Would that Karl 
August could have beheld this loveliness once more," 
he said. Then he read his lines, still legible after 
fifty years, and tears stole to his eyes. In a slow 
voice he repeated : " Wait : soon, like these, thou too 
shalt rest." Then-, after a brief pause of recollection, 
he turned to his friend. " Now we will go down," he 
said. He died at Weimar a few days later, March 
22, 1832, so peacefully that they did not know the 
moment of his departure. 

The morning after his death Eckermann went to 
the room where the body had been placed. "Lying 
on his back, he reposed as if asleep. Deep peace and 
firmness reigned in the features of his lofty, noble, 
face. The mighty forehead seemed still to shelter 
thoughts. . . . The servant drew aside the sheet," 
which alone covered him, " and I marvelled at the 
god-like magnificence of those limbs. The breast was 
extraordinarily strong, broad, and arched. The arms 
and thighs were full and softly muscular, the feet 
shapely and of perfect form. Nowhere on the whole 
body was there an}^ trace of fat or leanness or wast- 
ing away. A perfect man lay in great beauty before 
me." This body lies now with that of Schiller in the 
ducal mausoleum of Weimar, in front of the bronze 
coffins of his princely patrons, Luise and Karl 
August. 



GOETHE'S "FAUST." 



181 



CHAPTEE VI. 

goethe's " faust." 1 

Goethe's " Faust " is by the unanimous consent of 
German critics the greatest work of their literature, 
the most characteristic product of the German mind. 
And because of this very national quality it is per- 
haps more difficult of just appreciation than many 
less excellent works of less individualized art. 

In any study of this drama it is necessary to bear 
in mind how and from what it came to be. In the 
early part of the sixteenth century we hear of a cer- 
tain charlatan named Faust, who went about Ger- 
many swindling the credulous by fortune-telling, 
necromancy, and wonders of healing. He must have 
made a deep popular impression, for after a violent 
death, in 1540, he became almost immediately the 
nucleus around which gathered a great number of 
diabolical tales, which seemed to spring naturally 
from the gloomy fancy of this first century of Ger- 
man Protestantism, and in 1587, these legends were 
collected into a " Historia von D. Johann Faustus," 
written by an anonymous but zealous and mortally 
serious Lutheran. 

1 This chapter has appeared in "The Sewanee Review" for 
August, 1894. 



182 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



This legend, consciously or unconsciously, makes 
Faust the counterpart, as he was the contemporary, 
of Luther. 1 Son of a peasant, he achieves great dis- 
tinction at the University of Wittenberg, but falling 
into what the legend calls " a foolish and arrogant 
mind," he seeks by magic to deepen his knowledge of 
nature. A devil, Mephostophiles, becomes his ser- 
vant for twenty-four years, after which Faust is to 
belong to the Evil One, and the treaty is signed with 
his blood. At first the devil amuses Faust and his 
professorial famulus, Wagner, with high living, then 
with sexual pleasures, then he whets his curiosity in 
regard to the unseen world. This tending to rouse 
remorse, Faust takes to mathematics for consolation, 
and after a time visits hell and the stars. Then he 
makes wide travels on earth, playing various magical 
pranks, in the course of which he shares in wild 
student revelry ancf conjures up the Grecian Helen, 
whom he take as concubine, and has by her a sooth- 
saying child. When the twenty-four years are 
passed, the devil carries away Faust, who ruefully 
points out the moral of his folly. 

The point of this moral in the original Faust legend 
is directed against those humanists who were no more 
content with the obscurantism of Luther than they 
had been with that of Rome. In the reformed as in 
the unreformed Church a man must not seek to know 
beyond what is written, and above all he must eschew 
Helena and Greek ideals of life. Both the Luther of 
history and the Faust of the legend lecture on ancient 
1 Cp. Scherer, Faust-Buch, xxi. 



GOETHE'S " FAUST." 



183 



culture ; but Faust yields to it and Helena, while 
Luther marries after the Christian ordinance ; Luther 
clings to the Bible, Faust wishes to search beyond 
and behind it ; Luther fights with the devil, Faust 
compacts with him. Both visit Rome, where Luther 
is shocked, but Faust is amused and cynical. In 
short, this " Historia " is orthodoxy brandishing its 
theological birch at the freedom of human inquiry. 

This remains essentially the characteristic of all 
prose versions of the Faust legend, for of these there 
were several in the next century. Some, to be sure, 
endeavor to connect him with the idolatry they at- 
tributed to Rome, and some introduce the episode of 
Helena by an abortive attempt of Faust to seduce 
a servant girl, a motif afterward used by Goethe. 
Meantime, however, the "Historia " had been trans- 
lated into English and dramatized by Christopher 
Marlowe (1589), with no essential change in plot or 
theology. After Marlowe's death (1603) a good deal 
of diablerie was added to his serious tragedy in order 
to tickle the ears of the groundliugs. In this shape 
English actors brought the story back to Germany, 
where it attained much popularity as a spectacular 
drama, in which the clown, representing the shrewd 
philistine common-sense of the middle class, plays 
the chief part, counterfeiting and parodying Faust 
and almost masking the original serious purport of 
the piece. But a still lower fall, and greater vulgar- 
ization, awaited the legend. It became a puppet play, 
a sort of " Punch and Judy Show," to amuse children, 
and as such it was seen by the boy Goethe. 



184 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Meanwhile, however, Lessiug, with critical insight, 
had perceived the great possibilities of a subject that 
involved the deepest problems of man's moral exist- 
ence. " Dr. Faust," he wrote in 1759, "has a number 
of scenes in it that only a genius akin to Shakspere 
could have conceived." He even began, himself, a 
drama on the subject, though of this Goethe was 
probably ignorant. But what appealed to Lessing 
appealed equally, and perhaps more forcibly, to 
Goethe, for there were many things in the young 
man's career that might make him feel allied to the 
Faust whom he discerned behind the tinsel of the 
puppet-play. If Faust had explored all the branches 
of knowledge and found satisfaction in none, Goethe 
in his Leipzig years had been disappointed in his 
legal and metaphysical studies, of which latter " he 
thought he knew about as much as the teacher him- 
self." Nor was he better satisfied with his critical 
instructors. " What I wanted," he writes, " was a 
standard of judgment, and that no one seemed to 
possess." Then in Frankfort he had had a touch of 
speculative theology through Fraulein von Kletten- 
berg, and with it had been mixed a certain amount of 
pietistic alchemy and spirit-lore, which might fasci- 
nate but could not satisfy ; and to all these we must 
add the powerful solvent of Rousseau's social philos- 
ophy. That he found in his personal student expe- 
rience suggestions of Faust Avas not remarkable. He 
had a cynical friend, Behrisch, who, to judge from a 
letter, seems to have counselled him to play Faust's 
part toward a Leipzig Gretchen ; but the subject was 



goethe's "faust." 



185 



more probably brought home to him by a sympathetic 
study of Paracelsus, the sixteenth century physician, 
in whom Goethe found the connecting link between 
Faust and himself. 

Now the moment Goethe saw Faust in himself, the 
necessity of giving this subject literary expression 
became imperative to him. " Faust," as he would 
treat the subject, would contain his views of man, of 
destiny, of ethics, and of the spiritual world. It 
would be his testament to mankind. But there was 
a vast scope of intellectual and moral development 
that separated the young man who went to Stras- 
burg in 1770, hiding his cherished scheme from the 
critical and captious Herder, from the venerable octo- 
genarian who at eighty-two sealed the manuscript of 
the concluding part of what had been truly the work 
of his life, and wrote of it to Keinhard : " Await no 
finality. The last-solved problem of the history of 
the world and of mankind discloses immediately a 
new one to be solved." Incompleteness lay in the 
nature of the task, nor can we expect to find either 
in matter or form a unity of composition or plan. 
Much is unexplained, more is left without a clearly 
obvious purpose, and the sequence of some scenes 
offers insuperable chronological difficulties. As 
Scherer has said : " The whole plan is not carried out. 
Important scenes, which Goethe had proposed, are 
wanting. Inequalities were not. avoided. It is only 
when looked at in general and from a distance that 
the poem has unity, somewhat as the Homeric epics, 
or the * Nibelungenlied/ or the ' Gudrun.' Just as 



186 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



the work of various hands in the broad popular epics 
produced only a partly unified whole, or hid and 
swelled the original whole, so here, this work of sixty 
years, long continued, interrupted, and subject to the 
most various moods, could not attain a true inner 
uniformity and completeness. While in the great 
mass of the First Part we admire the sure, bold hand 
of the young or mature artist, the Second offers, be- 
side astonishingly successful portions, weaker parts, 
also, in which the hand of the aged master seems to 
tremble." 

Goethe was entirely conscious of this. He calls it, 
in writing to Schiller, his " tragelaph," or goat-stag, a 
fantastic creature, and again lie speaks of it as a 
" rhapsodical drama." In 1797 he found some of the 
early prose scenes " quite intolerable in their natural- 
ness," and proposed to put them into rhyme, which 
he did in every case but one. 

In its general outlines the genesis of the work 
seems to have been somewhat this. 1 The first idea 
of the drama, he tells us, came to him in 1769. It 
is not probable that he began writing on it till 1773, 
though some prose scenes may date back to the pre- 
ceding year. It was then known among his friends 
that he was engaged on the work, and they evidently 
expected something to out-herod " Gotz " in dramatic 
heresy of storm and stress. 2 It continued to be his 

1 Thomas, "Goethe's Faust," vol. i., Introduction, gives a con- 
densed statement of the present state of criticism on the First Part 
of Faust. 

2 "Schick' mir dafiir den Dr. Faust, Sobald dein Kopf ihn aus- 
gebraust," writes Gotter to Goethe, in July, 1773. 



goethe's ' faust." 



187 



favorite theme till he went to Weimar in 1775. But 
he worked on isolated scenes only, and probably had 
not thought out their connection. This seems the 
more likely as we study the character of a copy made 
from Goethe's manuscript soon after he went to Wei- 
mar by a lady of the court, Luise von Gochhausen, 
which was discovered in 1887, and has since been 
published by the distinguished Goethe scholar, Erich 
Schmid. 

We have here twenty scenes of mingled prose and 
verse giving the episode of Gretchen substantially as 
we now find it, but with a fragmentary introduction, 
from which still unfinished scenes were probably 
withheld, for it does not seem that Goethe added 
materially to " Faust " between his coming to Weimar, 
in 1775, and the eve of his return from Italy, in 
1788, when, in writing to Karl August from Rome, 
he announces that he " has made the plan of Faust," 
having " rediscovered the thread " and written a new 
scene, the "Witches' Kitchen," as an attempt to 
bridge that chasm between the early portions and the 
Gretchen episode which existed in the Gochhausen 
stage of the drama. But, as Thomas observes, 
"Goethe will find that the old thread is worthless 
and that he must discover a new one." This seems 
to have dampened his ardor once more. Tjittle was 
done in 1789, and only the promise of " Faust" for a 
complete edition of his works led him to publish it 
as a A Fragment" in 1790, from which no doubt he 
still kept back unfinished scenes. 

The date will explain why the Fragment attracted 



188 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



comparatively little attention. All eyes were turned 
to France in this second year of the Revolution. 
Schiller, however, saw in it the " torso of a Hercules," 
and repeatedly urged Goethe to resume his work on 
it, though without response, until June, 1797, when 
the elder poet writes : " Our ballad study has led me 
again to this misty, cloudy path," so that he is pre- 
pared to console himself for his disappointment in 
regard to a proposed Italian journey, in that " world 
of symbol, idea, and fog." To this end he tells 
Schiller that he has planned to finish up what is 
already begun, and " fit it to what has been printed." 
He proposes, he says, " to take things easily in this 
barbarous composition, striving to touch, rather than 
to satisfy the highest demands. The whole," he is 
convinced, " will always remain a fragment," for 
Goethe was now in his most classical period, and 
more distant from the essentially Teutonic concep- 
tion of the then existing scenes than he became after 
Schiller's death. 

It is therefore no wonder that " Faust " progressed 
slowly, and that the poet turned from ordering the 
earlier portions to working on the hint of the old 
legend that connected Faust with Helena, or, as it 
would immediately present itself to Goethe's mind, 
the Teutonic with the Hellenic spirit. But, as ap- 
pears from the Correspondence of 1800, he had re- 
served the development of this idea for a second 
part. It was not till 1808 that the First Part 
appeared in its present form, final, but still incom- 
plete and incongruous. This incongruity will best 



GOETHE'S " FAUST." 



189 



appear if we follow the course of its twenty-five 
scenes. 

The poem opens with a prelude in which a poet, a 
manager, and a Merry-Andrew exchange their views 
on the conditions of the German stage and of theatri- 
cal success. We have then a prologue in Heaven, 
where God and the Devil are introduced with the 
naivete' of Hans Sachs. In this prologue we are told, 
on the very highest authority, that Faust is God's 
servant. His service is indeed momentarily " con- 
fused," but God will bring him in due time to " clear- 
ness." Still, since man is prone to err as long as he 
strives, God is willing that Mephistopheles should 
tempt him if he will. Thus the reader or auditor is 
assured at the very outset that Faust will be saved. 
Indeed, Goethe's Mephistopheles tells the attentive 
reader that he cares less to win Faust's soul than to 
prove that he is right in his materialistic and pessi- 
mistic view of life. The point of interest is there- 
fore no longer what will become of Faust, but how 
this " clearness " is to come to him ; and the action 
is thus raised wholly out of the sphere of Marlowe's 
tragedy of sin and damnation to a serener ethical 
plane. But the reader should not forget that this 
prologue was written after Goethe himself had come 
to greater clearness about his intentions than when 
most of the First Part was composed. 

The play opens with Faust in his study. He is 
apparently an old man, though he has been professor 
but ten years. He has studied every profession, and 
is profoundly discouraged at the narrow scope of the 



190 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



human mind. He even contemplates suicide ; for 
magic, though it had enabled him to conjure the 
spirit world, had not given him power to compre- 
hend or control it. The carols of Easter morning 
bring him back to a healthier frame of mind, and we 
next find him with his famulus, the narrowly con- 
tented scholar, Wagner, who, like Hanswurst in the 
earlier drama, is the philistine antitype of Faust, 
mingling with the people on a spring holiday, but 
escaping at length from \v T hat he knows to be their 
unmerited gratitude for his medical aid in the 
pestilence. 

As they walk together, and Faust speaks of his 
longings, they are met by a black dog, whom Faust 
takes to his study, where, after some hocus-pocus, the 
dog reveals himself as the diabolical spirit Mephis- 
topheles, for the moment dressed as a wandering 
scholar, who announces himself as "a part of that 
force which always wills the ill and always works 
the good," or again as " the spirit that denies," wdiose 
"element is what yon call sin, destruction, evil," and 
that, because " all that exists is worthy of perishing." 
In so far, then, Mephistopheles is a sort of Nihilist. 
His attendant spirits lull Faust to sleep in exquisite 
dimeters and on his awaking he has become disposed 
to sign a compact by which, if the spirit can satisfy 
him, he may have him. 

" When on an idler's bed I stretch myself in quiet, 
There let at once my record end. 
Canst thou with lying flattery rule me, 
Until self-pleased myself I see, — 



GOETHE'S " FAUST." 



191 



Canst thou with rich enjoyment fool me, 
Let that day be the last for me." 1 

But this, as appears from the prologue, means nothing 
more than that he will then be driven to admit that 
Mephistopheles' pessimism is justified. Faust signs 
the compact with his blood, and after Mephistopheles 
has given cynical advice to a young scholar on his 
choice of a profession, he begins his task by intro- 
ducing his master to an orgy of student debauchery 
in Auerbach's wine cellar in Leipzig. 

The scene that follows is vivid and, alas, not untrue 
to student nature, though the reader will sympathize 
with Faust in the disgust it aroused in him. He was 
not to be satisfied with such chaff. It lay in the 
natural sequence of things that the obsequious devil 
should now shift from gluttony to lust. But at this 
point Goethe found a personal experience to embody, 
and thus there was developed a drama within a 
drama that so outgrew its subordinate place as to 
seem to many the central point of the entire work, 
as it is of the First Part. It is the Gretchen episode 
that for a time absorbs the poet's entire interest. 

It was essential for the drama that Faust should 
not wholly reject these untried attractions of sensual 
love. But in yielding he must carry our sympathy 
with him, since the prologue has told us, what indeed 
must from the first have been clear, in the very 
nature of the case and from the character of the 

1 The metrical citations of the First Part are from Taylor's 
translation. 



192 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



author, that Faust is to be brought by his trials to 
" clearness " and not to moral ruin. This Goethe 
sought to accomplish by the " Witches' Kitchen," 
where a rejuvenating potion is given to Faust, which, 
as Mephistopheles tells the spectators aside, is a love 
potion also. Helena, the ideal of womanly beauty, 
is shown him in a glass and "with this drink in his 
veins, he shall soon see Helena in every woman." 
But, after all, this attempt to enlist our sympathy for 
Faust the seducer, with his rather childish " I must," 
was not, perhaps could hardly be, successful, and it 
was probably the consciousness of this that made 
Goethe speak so slightingly of the work at this stage 
in letters to Schiller. As for the Apes' mysterious 
talk in this scene of the " Witches' Kitchen," Goethe 
afterward spoke of it as " dramatic-humoristic non- 
sense," and barring the " humorous," we may take his 
word for it. It is wholly impertinent to the main 
action of the play. 

With scene vii. and Gretchen we pass into a quite 
different atmosphere. Mephistopheles does little 
more than a cynical friend might do. The action is 
now no longer guided by the old play or puppet-show, 
but by Goethe's recollections of Leipzig and Sesen- 
heim. It is the theme treated already in <£ Gotz," in 
" Clavigo," in " E^mont," — the love of a girl of lower 
culture and station for a man socially and intellectu- 
ally her superior, though morally, if not inferior, at 
least more complex. The whole episode, in its de- 
lineation of character, and in its tragic development, 
is a masterpiece hardly equalled, save by Shakspere, 



goethe's "faust." 



193 



in the range of literature. It is thoroughly popular, 
universally comprehensible, and thus it fixed itself 
immediately in the public mind as the Faust drama, 
while the higher unity of the whole was perceived 
only by the thoughtful few. 

The episode, for such it is essentially, though artis- 
tically complete in itself, opens with the meeting of 
Faust and Gretchen as she leaves the church. With 
the boldness of a gallant adventurer he offers her his 
escort, which she refuses as a girl of the middle class 
might do, resolutely, but without indignation, and in 
a language that marks at the very outset her lack 
of culture. Here and throughout she is a girl of the 
people. She has the faults common to her class in 
Germany and elsewhere ; she is inclined to sentimen- 
tality, fond of dress and ornament, but yet she is in- 
dustrious, neat, and with the motherly instinct 
natural in a simple child of nature. Faust, thanks 
we must suppose rather to the witch's potion than 
to any peculiar elective affinity between his nature 
and hers, is fascinated by her and demands Mephis- 
topheles' aid to win her. But his diabolical arts 
would fail here. " I have no power over souls so 
green," he says, contemptuously, while the facile 
Faust thinks : "had he but seven hours he could win 
her by his own persuasion," and would have no need 
of the devil. Mephistopheles is pledged to help him, 
but, save for certain buried treasures which he un- 
earths, he resorts only to ordinary means of seduction. 
We have left for the moment mediaeval witchcraft for 
modern naturalism. 

13 



194 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



The next scene (viii.) takes us to Gretchen's " small 
but neatly kept chamber," where, as she braids her 
hair, she muses, a little flattered by the attentions of 
a gallant who " w r ould not have been so bold if he 
had not been of noble family." Presently she goes 
out, and Mephistopheles nurses Faust's passion by 
bringing him to this sanctuary of maidenhood, where 
each feels and speaks according to his nature, Faust 
as a lover, Mephistopheles as a cynical sensualist. 
They leave a casket of jewelry in her clothes-press. 
Gretchen returns and with the instinct of innocence 
notes the sultry air, and feels a dim foreboding. She 
finds the casket, and, without much questioning 
whence it came, she is carried away by the contents. 
She decks herself with the ornaments, and talks the 
while with a childlike pathos of the disadvantages of 
a poor girl in this worldly world. 

" To gold still tends, 
On gold depends, 
All, all ! Alas ! we poor." 

The ground being thus prepared, the willing go- 
between is found in the shape of neighbor Martha, 
whose prudent flirtation with the cautious Mephis- 
topheles forms a powerful foil to the ardent passion 
of Faust and the budding love of Gretchen. Tender 
feelings that might purify Faust's love are for the 
moment shipwrecked on the cynical promptings of 
his ally (xi.). In Martha's garden they meet, and 
Faust wins the promise of her love in two exquisite 
scenes (xii., xiii ), skilfully set off by the recurring 



GOETHE'S " FAUST." 



195 



bits of dialogue between Martha and Mephistophe- 
les, as each couple in turn is brought before the 
audience. 

There follows a scene (xiv.) which in its present 
place involves a contradiction, when viewed in the 
light of the last scene of the Second Part. Originally 
it had been placed much later, and after Gretchen 
had long given all she had to give. In his youth 
and up to the period of his union with Schiller, 
Goethe was willing to let Faust's relation to Gretchen 
continue until broken by an unwelcome interruption. 
In old age he found symbolical use for Gretchen, and 
wished to make her appear as one 

" Who had forgot herself but once, 
Who dreamed not that she erred." 

It then became necessary to cancel this scene or 
change its place, which leaves it, as is usual in such 
revisions, out of place. This scene is entitled "Forest 
and Cavern," and shows Faust in a gloomy mood. 
He has torn himself away from Gretchen, as the boy 
Goethe is said to have done from his first unhappy 
passion, and sought refuge in the bosom of nature. 
Now such moods are not apt to intervene between 
the promise and the fulfilment of love, and Mephis- 
topheles in painting the longing of the deserted 
Gretchen has an easy victory, hardly requiring the 
consummate skill with which he presents his tempta- 
tion. In its original place and with the original 
assumption of a prolonged relation, the scene would 
have had a far deeper note of moral tragedy. 



196 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



After an exquisite song in which Gretchen ex- 
presses her love-longing (xv.), there follows a second 
scene in Martha's garden, where Gretchen naively 
questions Faust of his religious faith, and gets an an- 
swer which is the poetry of pantheism, and wholly out- 
side the sphere of her intellect. It is interesting to see 
how clearly in a few speeches Goethe has placed the 
religious instinct in contrast to speculative theology, 
neither comprehending the other, the lower yielding 
to the higher, but not without moral loss. Gretchen 
instinctively shrinks from Mephistopheles ; but for 
Faust she will give her mother a sleeping potion, a 
poison with which Mephistopheles lias provided him, 
that they may love undisturbed ; for in him whom 
she loves, the simple Gretchen can conceive no 
harm. 

No long interval can intervene between the first 
and second " Garden " scenes (xii., xvi.), for the 
"Forest and Cavern" (xiv.) was apparently intended 
to represent no more than such an excursion as the 
boy Goethe was wont to make with his tutor in 
Frankfort, as he has told us in "Dichtung und Wahr- 
heit." The first interview (xii.) had been in the 
time of the flowering daisies, perhaps in April, for it 
must have been after Easter and before May 1st, the 
Walpurgis-Night that is to follow. 1 But in the 

1 This cannot be the Walpurgis-Night of the next year, because 
Valentin is killed two days before the Walpurgis, and also before 
Gretchen's child is born ; but, as will appear, a satisfactory chro- 
nology has become hopeless. How this came about is clearly stated 
by Thomas, 1. c. 324. 



GOETHE'S " FAUST." 



197 



scene that follows the second meeting, " At the 
Fountain" (xvii.), Gretchen has already fallen. Her 
prayer in the " Donjon " scene (xviii.) shows that 
she is conscious of approaching motherhood, and 
is already abandoned, and when her brother Valentin 
is introduced and killed by Faust, in scene xix., her 
condition has become common talk ; yet this, as 
we learn from that very scene, was on the 29th of 
April. 

Then, too, it will be noted that in no one of these 
scenes is the death of Gretchen's mother from the 
potion mentioned or assumed, or indeed reconcilable 
with what is said, though if, as is stated in the 
Second Part, Gretchen erred but once, this death 
must have already taken place, and it is, in fact, 
mentioned in the "Cathedral Scene" (xx.) that fol- 
lows. All this has come, like the previous trouble 
with "Forest and Cavern" (xiv.), from the changed 
conception of Faust's connection with Gretchen, at 
first conceived as a lasting liaison in which the 
mother's death is to be caused by the growing reck- 
lessness of Gretchen's absorbing passion, but after- 
ward regarded as a momentary aberration, as of a 
magnetic needle that turned immediately back to its 
celestial pole. 

The scenes "At the Fountain" and "Donjon" 
(xvii., xviii.) show first how sin in Gretchen's gentle 
nature fills the heart with tender and pathetic sym- 
pathy for fellow-sinners, then the penitent turns in 
impassioned prayer to the sorrow-laden Virgin- 
Mother, her soul recovering its purity and gaining 



198 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



infinite depth by its acquaintance with sorrow and 
pain. This scene, even though originally intended 
to allude to Gretchen's repentance for her mother's 
death, and afterward changed in its intention, might 
surely imply that Gretchen was abandoned, She 
speaks in the preceding scene (xvii.) of Faust in the 
past tense, and indeed it is difficult to conceive that 
such feelings as she utters there could coexist with 
their former relation. But yet in "Night" (xix.), 
the scene that follows these, Faust is disturbed at the 
thought of going to see his mistress (Biihle) without 
a gift, and Gretchen must surely be meant. 

It was important to Mephistopheles' purpose, how- 
ever, that Faust should not be present at the crisis 
that was now approaching in Gretchen's fate. Hence 
Valentin, her brother, was introduced, first that by 
publicly proclaiming her fault he might plunge her 
deeper into purifying shame ; second, that by killing 
him and so depriving her of the only relative to whom 
she could look for help, Faust might intensify his 
guilt and the final catastrophe be justified ; and, 
lastly, that in order to escape from the consequences 
of this murder, Faust might be compelled to leave 
the city and therefore to abandon Gretchen. " Night," 
then, belongs to an earlier plan than the two preced- 
ing scenes. And the conceptions were never satis- 
factorily reconciled. If Faust had already abandoned 
Gretchen, as those scenes presuppose, the Valentin 
episode would be unnecessary, and the " Cathedral 
Scene " which succeeds might appropriately follow 
Gretchen's prayer (xviii.). But the character of 



GOETHE'S "FAUST." 



199 



Valentin has a vigor and clearness of conception that 
give it enduring life. 

The " Cathedral Scene" (xx.) with its funeral se- 
quence, Dies Irae, was originally headed " Obsequies 
of Gretchen's Mother." As the verses of the Judg- 
ment Hymn resound in the penitent's ear, an evil 
spirit whispers to Gretchen thoughts of despair, and 
she falls fainting in the passion of her purgation, at 
the thought that " the glorified turn their faces from 
her." This scene in its present position must fall in 
the autumn, though, if Gretchen " erred but once," 
and this single error w r as the occasion of her mother's 
death, it must have taken place in April, and such 
is the assumption of the scene that immediately 
follows. 

For the tension of the tragedy, which has here be- 
come intense, is now broken by the witches' carnival 
on Walpurgis-Night (May 1st). One may justify the 
introduction of such a scene on ironical grounds, as 
Heine does in the case of Shakspere's clowns ; but 
the scene is too long for this purpose, and wholly 
foreign matter dealing with the personal and literary 
controversies of the time has been wantonly intruded 
in " Oberon's Wedding." Nothing connects the tra- 
ditional Faust with the Walpurgis Carnival, though 
he was brought by the legend to the Brocken, the 
peak of the Harz on which it took place. But this 
is purely indifferent. We are here transferred from 
the modern realism of the Gretchen episode to the 
mediseval atmosphere of the early scenes, and the 
Faust who meets us here, singing with will-o'-the- 



200 MODERN GEEMAN LITERATURE. 



wisps, dancing with witches, enjoying the wild rout 
and Rabelaisian wit, is not the Faust who loved 
Gretchen, nor he who killed Valentin. This, too, like 
the "Witches' Kitchen," was "dramatic-humorous 
nonsense," — we have Goethe's word for it, — - and here 
the humor is not lacking, if one does not insist too 
anxiously on sense. Goethe wrote it in 1800, and as 
late as 1830 he still rejoiced in it. " Really," he said 
to Falk, " one ought to play the joke oftener in one's 
youth, and give 'em such bits {Brocken) as the 
Brocken." 

An interruption in the course of the drama was 
justified, for fate was hurrying it to a close. We are 
brought back to the tragic mood by the scene named 
" Dreary Day." Some interval has elapsed ; Faust, 
has not seen Gretchen again, and is now far away 
when startled by the news which comes to him, we 
know not whence, 1 that Gretchen has been a wretched 
outcast and is now an accused prisoner, or rather, as 
appears later, convicted of infanticide, and destined 
to execution. This is one of those prose scenes that 
Goethe, in 1798, had found " intolerable in comparison 
with the rest," and had not succeeded in versifying. 
It is strong, but the extravagance of the language 
smacks of " Storm and Stress." Faust insists on 
being taken to her cell that they may attempt her 
rescue, and on magic horses they urge their nightly 
flight, while beneath the gallows witches soar and 
sweep, bow and bend, scatter, devote, and doom. 

1 It had heen proposed to reveal it to him on the Brocken, hut 
the intention was not realized. 



GOETHE'S " FAUST." 



201 



And so we are brought to the climax of Gretchen's 
prison cell. Her mind is shaken by grief and the 
misery of her lot. Her tragic madness suggests 
Ophelia's, and perhaps surpasses its model. Faust 
finds her lying on the straw, singing words of an old 
song, which she turns to apply to her dead child. 
She takes her lover for her jailer, and pleads patheti- 
cally with him. Now she asks for her child, now 
imagines hell beneath her prison. At last she recog- 
nizes Faust, and half incoherently recalls the course 
of their love. She clings to him with tenderest pas- 
sion, but she will not fly, " it is so wretched to beg, 
and with a bad conscience beside." Suddenly she 
remembers that the child is drowned, and cries to 
Faust to haste to save it, for it still quivers ; or she 
tells him how she will be buried with her mother 
and brother, a little aside, the baby on her right 
breast, alone, for she can no longer feel a perfect 
sympathy even with her lover. 

" It seems as though you repelled me," she cries ; 
" and yet 't is you, and you look so kind and good." 
This is noteworthy. She cannot unite herself with 
Faust again, because she has gone through a stage of 
spiritual development that separates her from him. 
When at the close of the Second Part, Gretchen is 
bidden to rise to higher regious, that if Faust dimly 
comprehend her he may follow, the clew is given to 
the reason why she has this feeling here. And thus 
every tragic element is combined to deepen Faust's 
agony. At last Mephistopheles warns him that day 
is dawning. Gretchen shrinks in terror from that 



202 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



un spiritual spirit, and when Faust, a last time, urges 
her to fly, she commits herself rather to the judgment 
of God, her last breath a prayer, and the last quiver 
of life a shudder for her lover. " She is judged," says 
Mephistopheles. But Faust is not to be left in this 
error. A voice from above proclaims : " Is saved," 
and as her appealing voice, calling him, dies away, 
Mephistopheles, snatching Faust to his side, vanishes. 

So closes the First Part, and with it the microcos- 
inic portion of Faust's experience, which has come to 
take a larger place than its function in the general 
plan would make artistically justifiable. But rules 
of proportion, and indeed of formal criticism in gen- 
eral, cannot be applied to " Faust " as a whole. What 
has given the First Part its pre-eminent place in 
German literature, at least in the popular conscious- 
ness, is in part the gnomic wisdom of Mephistopheles, 
which takes up and embodies a view of the world 
and of life which all recognize and too many share ; 
but, more even than that, it is the unique portrayal 
of guilty innocence and betrayed simplicity in the 
drama of Gretchen's fall and purgation through 
suffering. 

The Second Part of " Faust," in bringing us to the 
greater world and its wider activities, follows more 
closely in its outline the old legend. Magic resumes 
its sway, and the whole becomes more spectacular 
and operatic. A thread of esoteric meaning, or rather, 
perhaps, many threads, can be traced through all, 
now plainly in sight, now masked almost completely 
from view ; sometimes because they deal with a 



GOETHE'S " FAUST." 



203 



state of feeliDg and political conditions that are no 
longer present to our minds, sometimes because vari- 
ous allegorical interpretations run for a time side by 
side and at last become inextricably involved, some- 
times, too, because, as occasionally in the First Part, 
the poet with wanton irony mystifies his readers. 

To follow out and interpret, as far as may be, the 
endless complications of these parabolical types and 
personifications is the duty of special commentators 
of whom there is no lack, for during the last twenty 
years and more, critical attention has been directed 
in an increasing measure to the " Faust" as a whole, 
to its ethical and philosophical, rather than to its 
literary and aesthetic content. Nor will this be 
thought unnatural when it is considered that the 
present generation of readers is losing that delicate 
sense of form that finds its best illustration in the 
Germans, Heine and Platen, and their French con- 
temporaries, Gautier, Flaubert, and the Parnassians. 
Men care little to-day for art for art's sake. The 
true is in danger of being divorced from the beauti- 
ful, a danger indicated by the overshadowing position 
of Ibsen. It is precisely the age in which we should 
look for a revival of interest in "Faust" as a whole, 
as distinct from the artistically admirable episodes of 
Gretchen and Helena. 

No analysis of the Second Part of "Faust" can 
bring out its manifold beauties, but it is necessary to 
recall the sequence, or rather succession, of scenes to 
justify any judgment of the drama as a work of art, 
in which all the parts, to be fitly joined together, 



204 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



must be in clue proportion to each other and to the 
whole. 

The close of the tragedy of G retch en should have 
left Faust crushed with guilty despair. The Second 
Part finds him " bedded on flowery turf, tired, rest- 
less, seeking sleep," while graceful little spirits, accom- 
panied by iEolian harps, sing soothing strains. The 
purpose of their song is " to calm the fierce struggle 
of the heart, to remove the bitter glowing arrows of 
reproach, and purify his breast from the horror it has 
experienced." They will " bathe him in dew from 
Lethe's flood, and give him back to holy light." Thus 
Faust is prepared to enter on the new experiences of 
the Second Part, and at the same time it is made 
.very clear that, to Goethe, action, not penitential 
brooding, is to be the means by which Faust is to 
overgrow the wounds of his soul's fault and be 
brought to " clearness." And so we are already pre- 
pared to find that, in submitting Gretchen to Faust, 
Mephistopheles has realized his own saying-, he has 
" willed the ill and wrought the good." Faust is 
stronger, wiser, deeper, for having known Gretchen ; 
but she is to him as the neiges d'antan, and lie looks 
forward, not back, until at the very close, the circle 
of his life is joined, and the beginning meets the end. 
Such seems to be the ethical import of the introduc- 
tory scene, darkened a little toward the close by 
interwoven allusions to Goethe's theory of colors. 
A considerable part of this prelude, as indeed of the 
whole Second Part, is operatic in character. 

The spectator is now transported to the palace of 



GOETHE'S " FAUST." 



205 



an emperor, who is here represented as a frivolous 
and incompetent ruler, perhaps that he may the more 
require the aid of Faust's magic arts, and the more 
freely grant him scope for future activity. But it is 
hard to win much interest for services that cost only 
the wave of a magician's wand, and serve only to 
atone for the results of incompetence. Hence the 
scenes at the imperial court, here and in the Fourth 
Act, are aesthetically the least pleasing. 

We learn first that extravagance has brought want 
in all quarters of the empire. Then Mephistopheles, 
who has introduced himself as court-fool, offers to re- 
lieve the embarrassment by means of countless buried 
treasures, the property of the crown. But from the 
question how he is to recover them, the emperor 
turns gladly to a carnival which in the main is also 
of Mephistopheles' preparation. Commentators say 
that the buried treasure is undiscovered knowledge, 
but it is difficult to carry the allegory through in this 
sense. 

In the course of the operatic revels a chariot ap- 
pears bearing Faust as Plutus, god of material, and 
here at least of intellectual, wealth, driven by a youth 
who seems to allegorize the ideal use of these gifts, 
but who is also intended, as Goethe told Eckermann, 
to represent Faust's future son, Euphorion, though 
why this should be is not clear. Mephistopheles fol- 
lows them as Avarice. Together they come to the 
throne of Pan, the Emperor, who in this allegorical 
capacity signs a treasury note, which when multiplied 
indefinitely gives a paper currency secured by yet 



206 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



undiscovered riches. Perhaps this may stand for 
those metaphysical speculations based on the un- 
knowable, in which many Germans were then rejoic- 
ing as in an intellectual fool's paradise. Besides this, 
however, there is a direct satire on the use and abuse 
of paper money itself, especially toward the close of 
the episode. 

Pleased with his imaginary wealth, the emperor 
wishes to be amused. He demands that Helena and 
Paris, types of ideal manhood and womanhood, be con- 
jured up before him. That is, wealth, material and 
intellectual, arouses the desire for culture, of which 
Greek culture is the universal type and model. But 
over this classic realm of the beautiful Mephistopheles, 
the demon of an ascetic and supernatural religion, 
has no power. He turns to Faust and bids him de- 
scend to the mothers who dwell in the nether world, 
the incomprehensible creators of the ideal. Fo; 
Mephistopheles, though he cannot seek the ideal him- 
self, can give Faust a key to guide him ; and this key 
grow r s in his hand, burns bright, and gives new 
strength and courage, though when Faust vanishes 
with it Mephistopheles utters a sneering doubt whether 
he will ever return from his quest. The Key seems 
to be enthusiasm, by which alone the ideal is revealed, 
but which may become destructive unless he who 
holds it in his hand stand firm on reality. 

A scene of strong satire on the petty German 
courts now intervenes to give space for Faust's search, 
but he returns at length with power to summon the 
Trojan Paris, on whom the courtiers comment, each 



GOETHE'S " FAUST.' 



207 



after his kind. Helena then appears. She does not 
attract Mephistopheles, for Greek beauty is not, like 
this demon of Northern fancy, the sensuous negation 
of mediaeval asceticism, but is outside of it and in- 
comprehensible to it. Nor can the courtiers compre- 
hend her charm. But Faust's past life has attuned 
his mind to thrill responsive to this new vision of 
beauty. With overwhelmed longing he endeavors to 
grasp it, crying : " Whoe'er has seen her cannot 
bear her loss." But the Greek spirit is still too for- 
eign for his Teutonic mind. She vanishes, and he 
lies fainting, to be borne away by Mephistopheles. 
The close of this first act, the " Key," the " Mothers," 
and " Helena," is all that is essential to the ethical 
thesis of " Faust." 

The Second Act opens in Faust's study, where he 
still lies in a swoon, while the conversation of Mephis- 
topheles with a famulus, with Wagner, now a famous 
professor and physicist, and with a sceptical bachelor, 
once the student whom Mephistopheles had coun- 
selled, brings before us the conceptions of meta- 
physics, aesthetics, and ideal culture that might be 
contending in Faust's mind ; all not without pointed 
satire on the conceited self-assurance of Young 
Germany and the metaphysicians of 1820. 

Wagner has made chemically an Homunculus, but * 
since he cannot give his little man a body, he must 
stay sealed in the flask where he was created. This 
Homunculus is clearly the artificial conception of the 
ideal that comes not from the experience of life, but 
from study. It, too, as well as Faust, has Greek as- 



208 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



pirations, and therefore it seeks to draw its parent to 
classic ground. Suddenly it escapes from Wagner's 
hand, hovers over the head of Faust and reveals the 
course of the sleeper's mind as his soul gradually ac- 
customs itself to the Greek view of life and happi- 
ness, the view, it may be added, of Goethe's " Eoman 
Elegies." But the Homunculus is a student's creation, 
and the classical life that he seeks is found in the 
shadowy visions of Pharsalia's Walpurgis-Night, 
whither he counsels that Faust be taken. Of this 
classical carnival Mephistopheles has heard nothing. 
" How should you ? " says Homunculus. " You know 
romantic ghosts alone. A genuine ghost, that must 
be classic, too." Though Mephistopheles dreads the 
Greeks who " entice man's breast to bright sins, so 
that ours seem gloomy beside them," yet the tempta- 
tion of Thessalian witches overcomes his repulsion, 
and they all follow the Homunculus, dependent, as 
Mephistopheles pregnantly observes, " on creatures 
we ourselves have made." 

The classical Walpurgis-ISTight has little direct 
connection with the course of Faust's development. 
Seeking everywhere Helena, he is borne, as one in- 
sane, to Mantho for his cure ; but she " loves the man 
who seeks the unattainable," and directs him to Per- 
sephoneia's realm. Of this journey, however, we 
hear no more, nor is it made clear by what means 
Helena is brought to the upper world. But, aside 
from this, the scene serves a useful purpose in bringing 
the reader or spectator to a classical frame of mind by 
the introduction of the various ideals of antiquity 



GOETHE'S " FAUST." 



209 



that are here brought before him. Mephistopheles, 
counselled by the Sphinx and teased by the Lamiae, 
feels first at home with the personified ugliness of the 
Phorkyades, while Homunculus, in his zeal to obtain 
incorporation, loses himself among the philosophers, 
to be dashed to pieces at last against Galatea's throne, 
who is herself that realized ideal of which he was the 
scholar's reflection. To follow out these allegorical 
threads in all their twisted windings would perhaps 
go beyond the poet's intention, for he has clearly laid 
them aside himself to weave into this scene an alle- 
gorized debate between Anaxagoras and Thales, the 
former representing those who held the volcanic 
origin of the earth and opposed the investigations of 
the " Neptunists," among whom Goethe, who speaks 
here under Thales' mask, reckoned himself a leader. 
And so important does this second allegory become 
in the mind of the poet that he allows the Classical 
Walpurgis-Night to close with an operatic scene on 
the iEgean Sea, where sirens, nereids, and tritons, 
with Nereus, Proteus, and Thales, sing the praises of 
the sea and the triumph of the sea-born Galatea, 
while we are left uncertain how or why Helena is 
brought to the upper world. 

For the opening of the Third Act finds her with a 
chorus of captured Trojan women before Menelaus' 
palace in Sparta, anxiously veiling from her own eyes 
the memory of all that has intervened since Paris 
carried her away, as though', perhaps, this were a con- 
dition of her return from the underworld. She 
thinks herself just landed, sent before by Menelaus to 

14 



210 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



prepare a sacrifice. With her is Mephistopheles, 
disguised as Phorkyas, type of ugliness, a servile 
contrast to Helena's queenly beauty and bearing. 
Through Phorkyas she learns that she is the destined 
victim of Menelaus' jealous rage. This signifies that 
the political jealousy of Greece destroyed its culture 
and its art. Though willing to die calmly, Helena 
does not disdain the proffered protection of a settle- 
ment of Northmen in the hills just nortli of Sparta, 
" made some twenty years ago," a hint that tells us 
exactly what is meant; for if we count back twenty 
years from 1808, when this scene was completed, we 
have the date of Goethe's return to Germany from 
Eome (1788), with all the wonderful results of that 
journey for him and for the culture of his country. 
Faust, the leader of this bold and venturous band, is 
praised by Phorkyas as of a gentler nature than the 
Greeks, which seems an allusion to the Christian ele- 
ment in modern civilization ; and his fortress-palace 
is made to typify Gothic art. To bring Helena to 
Faust's palace is to bring Greek ideals to Germany, 
while, of course, here as before, in the details there is 
much that may be explained in this way or in that, 
or more wisely, sometimes, in no way at all. 

For such a man as Goethe, to know Greek art was 
to make it a part, an inseparable part, of his artistic 
being ; and Greek art found in him a protector who 
yet preserved his German nature. And so in the 
drama Faust and Helena need for their union no 
long wooing, though in the brief play of its delicate 
fancies Faust teaches her the unwonted German 



GOETHE'S "FAUST." 



211 



rhyme, into which the chorus falls a little later, after 
Faust has taken his bride to the peaceful retreat of 
Arcadia. Here a child is born to them, Euphorion. 
Goethe told Eckermann (December 20, 1829) that 
this child, who had appeared also in another form in 
the First Act, was the personification of poetry. But 
there is something in the manner of Goethe's an- 
nouncement that suggests mystification, and it is very 
clear that, at the close of his brief career, Euphorion 
is but a thin mask for Lord Byron. 

All of what is said by and of Euphorion seems 
consistent with no interpretation that has yet been 
suggested by the commentators, but still the essential 
elements of the episode embody a profound aesthetic 
truth. Euphorion is introduced as a naked genius, 
without wings, faunlike but not animal, springing 
higher and higher from the ground, while his mother 
cautions him that he may leap but not fly, and, like 
Antaeus, will gain strength by touching earth. The 
German Faust at first is less disturbed than his 
Grecian spouse at these soaring leaps, but Euphorion's 
flight is ever wilder, more unrestrained, until at last 
he falls, like Icarus, dead at his parents' feet, and dis- 
appears in light, leaving behind his mantle and lyre, 
and calling on his mother to follow. The fire and 
throbbing energy of this scene are indescribable, and 
the threnody to Lord Byron with which the chorus 
bewails Euphorion's death is a sympathetic and dis- 
criminating tribute of exquisite beauty. Helena fol- 
lows the summons of her son, and having embraced 
Faust, she vanishes, leaving her garment and veil in 



212 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



his arms. They dissolve into clouds, lift Faust, and 
bear him away. 

Here the essential allegory seems to be that a per- 
fect and fruitful union between modern and classic 
life is impossible. It produces an idealism that de- 
stroys itself because it is not in touch with the 
actualities of our life. Therefore Euphorion perishes, 
and therefore Helena must return to the shades. But 
she leaves behind her all that we can take up into 
our modern life of the classic ideals, the garment, that 
is, " love of beauty," especially in artistic form. Hence 
Phorkyas, falling a moment from Mephistopheles' 
role, bids Faust : — 

" Hold fast to what remains to thee of all, 
The garment ! Leave it not ; for demons pluck 
Already at its skirts, and to the underworld 
Would drag it gladly. Cling the faster to it. 

Above all commonplace it lifts thee up 
Upon the air, long as thou, canst endure." 

It is, then, through the Greek view of life that 
Faust is to gain the foundation for his future experi- 
ence, and this foundation is to be a practical idealism. 
The influence of Helena on Faust is that he no longer 
gazes in the stars while his feet are in the mire. 
He will from this time look more about him than 
above him. He will still strive, but his activity will 
be in this world and for his fellow-men. 1 It is not, 
then; merely aesthetic teaching that Helena has for 

1 Let him to whom this seems strange read what Goethe says' to 
Eckermann on thoughts of immortality, Feb. 25, 1824. 



GOETHE'S "FAUST." 213 

Faust, but a profoundly ethical one, and one of suffi- 
cient importance to the drama to make the subordi- 
nate and introductory position of the First and 
Second Acts artistically justifiable. The Fourth Act, 
so far as it concerns the main theme, exists only to 
make the Fifth possible, and this in turn is only 
putting into action the ethics of the " Helena," which 
is thus the cardinal point of the whole. How this 
fact accounts for the long comparative neglect and 
present growing appreciation for the Second Part will 
appear presently. 

The Fourth Act shows us Faust on a mountain, 
full of life and energy which draw their inspiration 
from classical memories. His ambition is now useful 
labor. He wishes to redeem broad tracts of land for 
settlement from the destroying ocean. That he may 
gain imperial aid and sanction in this project, Mephis- 
topheles proposes that he should assist the emperor, 
now engaged in hopeless war with rebellious vassals. 
All this has no other dramaturgical purpose than to 
introduce the activities of the Fifth Act. It serves, 
however, as the vehicle of much political satire, of 
which the general tendency is that government should 
be left to those who make it their business to govern. 1 
This act was the last written, and shows clear traces 
of old age. It is incomplete also. The scene in 
which Faust receives the reward of his magical aid, 

1 Compare Eckermann, March, 1832, toward the end of the 
second volume, where among much else in the same spirit, Goethe 
says : "I hate bungling like sin, especially bungling in politics, 
from which nothing but evil for thousands and millions can come." 



214 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



in a cause for which, again, it is hard to feel much 
sympathy, was not written when Goethe sealed the 
manuscript, in August, 1831. 

The Fifth Act shows Faust's ambition in good part 
realized. He is now a century old. 1 He has com- 
pelled the evil spirits to his service, and trade and 
agriculture nourish in spite of their perversity. He 
is impatient of opposition, however, and has still to 
learn moderation in prosecuting a good cause. This 
lesson is taught him by Mephistopheles' officious 
murder of Baucis and Philemon, whose small posses- 
sion was a thorn to his unsatiated desire. Once more 
that cynical spirit has " willed the ill and wrought 
the good." And now the end draws on. Want, 
Guilt, Need, and Care approach his palace. Care 
alone can enter, and under her breath Faust grows 
blind, but she cannot touch him, although he refuses 
from henceforth magic aid. The four depart, but 
Death appears. Faust sees him not, but in his blind- 
ness he urges on his unselfish task, to provide dwell- 
ings which will prove for men a doubly precious 
possession, because they must be maintained by con- 
stant effort against the encroaching sea. He thinks 
he hears the busy spades of his laborers, but they 
are the Leinures who dig his grave. With the vision 
of his accomplished purpose before his sinking eyes, 
he enjoys, even now, in anticipation, that highest 
moment in which he could say to the present : " Ah ! 
linger still, thou art fair." And so he dies and is 
laid in the grave. 

1 See Eekermann, June 6, 1831. 



GOETHE'S " FAUST." 



215 



There follows a fantastic scene, in which Mephis- 
topheles and his attendant spirits endeavor to prevent 
the escape of the soul from Faust's body. This cyni- 
cal degradation of the ideal is interrupted by a 
heavenly choir and a glory shining from above. For 
a time these strains of mystic beauty alternate with 
Mephistopheles' sensuous animalism. But the roses 
of penitence that the angels strew, burn and scatter 
the demons, and in a moment when Mephistopheles 
is distracted by the sensuous charms of certain angel 
boys, Faust's soul escapes him. This scene is essen- 
tially operatic, and that which concludes the drama 
can hardly be conceived without a musical accom- 
paniment. A chorus of blessed children and various 
typical figures of the mediseval Church, the Ecstatic, 
the Profound, the Seraphic Father, here conceived as 
anchorites, sing celestial hymns. Then the "younger," 
and the " more perfect " angels take up the strain ; 
and from the highest, purest, of the hermit cells the 
"Marian Doctor" hails the advent of Mary, the 
Merciful, surrounded by her penitents. 

By turns and together, the Woman who washed 
the Lord's feet with ointment, the Woman of Samaria, 
and the Egyptian Mary beg the Blessed Virgin's 
pardon for " this good soul, that forgot itself but once, 
and thought not that it erred." And now first since 
the close of her tragic life, Gretchen appears, and, in 
a stanza that suggests her impassioned prayer to the 
Blessed Virgin in the First Part (xviii.), she begs 
that Mary will bend her countenance graciously on 
her joy, since " the early love brought to ' clearness' 



216 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



at last, returns again." " Grant me to teach him. 
The new day blinds him still." But Mary answers : 
" Eise to higher spheres. If he dimly apprehend you 
he will follow." And the mystic chorus concludes 
with those well-known words : — 

"The eternal- womanly 
Draws us upward and on." 

In this gnomic saying we ought to find, if Goethe 
is serious with us, the key to all. "What, then, is 
" eternally womanly," and who are meant by " us," — 
human beings, or men as distinct from women ? Was 
it this " eternally womanly " that drew Gretchen up- 
ward, or was it not rather the eternal manly ? This, 
at least, will afford us a clear interpretation to that 
last word of the mystical drama. If by " us " we under- 
stand " men/' then the " eternal," essential element in 
women that draws " us " is " love ; " but this love is, 
in its essence, unselfish, altruistic, fruitful, and hence 
the teaching of the drama is here proclaimed to be 
that we rise, or are raised, by altruistic effort. 1 

As Scherer has observed, 2 Faust " chooses not 
wealth but work," and in that work finds his "salva- 
tion." To this choice he is brought, mediately by 
Gretchen, immediately by Helena, for beauty is posi- 

1 If love is selfish, the result, as Bleibtreu cynically says, is : 
" Das Ewig-weibliche zieht ims herab 
Und wird des niannlichen Stolzes Grab." 

' L This paragraph is based throughout on, and in part translated 
from Scherer, Litteraturgeschichte, 719 seq., for I have not found 
it possible to state what I wished without seeming to borrow from 
him. 



GOETHE'S " FAUST." 



217 



tive, creative, and so here, as in life, contrasted with 
the ugly, the evil, the negative, as it appears in 
Mephistopheles-Phorkyas. It is Helena that reveals 
to Faust the worth of life, of this life, and so frees 
him from the spirit that denies. The lesson here is 
the same as in " Wilhelm Meister." Goethe's poet 
and Goethe's scholar both pass from a sensitive, 
groping, contemplative, searching, aesthetic existence, 
under the spur of negative spirits and ideal models, 
to active, useful labor. In both Goethe puts unsel- 
fish activity above the claims of esthetics or learn- 
ing. He does not let his poet and actor, nor yet 
his groping student, find satisfaction. He calls to 
them: ''You must act, work." The greatest repre- 
sentative of German poetry, a many-sided and suc- 
cessful investigator, bows before practical life. He 
does not look longingly over into strange regions, 
conscious of his own weakness. No ! He knows the 
practical world, -has been of it, has worked success- 
fully in it, and yet has left it. He recommends in 
his poem what he neglected in his life. Thus " Faust " 
expressed in a time that was poor in noble deeds 
the longing for heroic action. It echoed the protest 
of the statesman Vom Stein against the excess of 
metaphysical speculation that had thinned the life- 
blood of Germany. 

But already the tide had turned. The change that 
Goethe demanded he lived to see in a fair way to be 
accomplished, and we have lived to see the real ex- 
alted above the ideal, action above thought, perhaps 
in undue measure. Hence the general popular com- 



218 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



prehension of " Faust " as a whole in this period more 
than ever before, because more than ever before it 
reflects the popular mind to which, as to Faust, the 
" logos" is neither " word," nor " thought," nor " power," 
but " action." 3 The dangers of such a philosophy of 
life are obvious; some of them are already realized in 
the luxury of our hedonists and the socialism and 
nihilism of our proletariat ; but " Faust," if rightly 
apprehended, offers two poisons, each an antidote of 
the other, which joined together help and^strengthen. 
Neither Euphorion's idealism that will not touch earth, 
nor Mephistopheles' realism that will not rise above it, 
but that just mean that idealizes the real and realizes 
the ideal, — that is the world- wisdom of " Faust." 

1 Part I. sc. 3. Not Wort, nor Sinn, nor Kraft, but That. 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



219 



CHAPTER VII. 

SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 

Before the Court Theatre of Weimar is a well-known 
statue. On a single pedestal, side by side stand the 
two men who more than all the rest made not alone 
that theatre, but that town and that duchy, famous 
above any other in literary Germany, — Goethe and 
Schiller. The elder poet holds a wreath before him 
on which the younger has also laid his hand, so that 
either might seem to be offering it to the other, — a 
fitting memorial of a friendship which, when once it 
had been formed, was never clouded by any shadow 
of jealousy. Many have asked the question which 
the sculptor has so gracefully evaded : Which was 
the greater poet ? Nor can the question be answered 
categorically at all. For one cannot measure poets 
as trees, or gauge their intellectual strength by any 
spirit test. The personal equation troubles the judg- 
ment of the critic. They are " not like to like, but 
like in difference." Among the great mass of Ger- 
mans Schiller is better known and more read. He 
is probably more often cited by the average man, and 
much more often by the average woman. On the 
other hand, men of higher culture, men trained in 



220 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



literary study, men who apprehend the spirit of the 
age, could not but prefer Goethe were a choice forced 
on them, though they would feel keenly that neither 
could take the place of the other. 

" For the last twenty years," said Goethe to Ecker- 
mann (May 12, 1825), "people have been contending 
which was the greater, Schiller or I. They ought to 
rejoice that they have two such men to contend about." 
Indeed they are essentially supplementary to each 
other. This has been most clearly stated by Scherer 
(1. c. 587) : " The Greeks were naive. Goethe is a 
naive poet, while Schiller defines himself and his 
fellows as sentimental. The naive poet is nature. The 
sentimental poet seeks nature. One imitates the 
natural, the other offers the ideal. That has on its 
side the reality of sense, this has a greater object. 
That calms, this stirs. That gives us joy in the living 
present, while this brings us into discord with practical 
life. And so in friendship the realist rejoices in 
what he gives his friend, the idealist in what he re- 
ceives." This supplementary relation of Schiller 
toward Goethe furnishes the best justification for the 
customary bracketing of their names in German 
literature, where they are wont to figure as the Dios- 
curi, the "heavenly twins," who appear together and 
give one another mutual aid, though in many ways 
their work and literary influence were almost as 
strongly contrasted as their lives. We have seen 
with what Olympian serenity Goethe stepped easily 
from height to height of life, pursuing an unthwarted 
course to an untroubled end. It is not so needful to 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



221 



trace in detail the career of Schiller, for the idealism 
of his literary work made it much less the immediate 
reflection of his life. But no man is, or can be, so 
thorough an idealist that his life shall not affect his 
work, and one must know somewhat of the one to 
understand the other. 

Schiller's father had been a military surgeon. His 
mother was an inn-keeper's daughter, at Marbach, 
and there Schiller was born, Nov. 10, 1759, while his 
father was away on military service, for it was the 
time of the Seven Years' War. His childhood was 
uneventful, but in his 14th year he came in contact 
with the petty despotism of Duke Karl Eugene of 
Wurtemberg in a way that could not fail to leave its 
mark on his political attitude in the years that fol- 
lowed. This autocratic ruler had set his heart on a 
new military academy, and into it he proposed to get 
by smiles or force the best students from all the class- 
ical schools of the duchy. Among the victims thus 
selected for ducal favor was Schiller, and so intensely 
against his will that it is perhaps not too much to 
say with Diintzer that it was a case of "gentle 
kidnapping." 

This school, like " Dotheboys' Hall," had no holi- 
days. Boys could never go home, and especial per- 
mission was required from the duke for parents to 
see their sons. Such interviews could take place, as 
in a convent, only before a third person. The school 
was aptly called " Solitude," and all letters that came 
to it or were sent from it were opened to see if they 
contained due meed of praise for its princely patron. 



222 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Of course such restrictions nursed a rebellious mind 
in the young Schiller, as it would in any boy of spirit. 
But his delicate mental organization probably suffered 
more acutely than most. He could not endure the 
military uniform that prescribed even the cut of the 
hair, nor the dreary dormitory that he shared with 
fourteen other students, who rose at five in summer and 
six in winter to a gloomy twilight breakfast. Then 
came lessons, and then the duke reviewed the school, 
accompanied, perhaps, by members of his court, whose 
faces were fairer than their reputation. At the review 
the boys had to show tickets bearing evidence of 
virtue or guilt, and the duke meted out punishment 
to the offenders. In the afternoons they might busy 
themselves with little gardens or walk two by two in 
solemn procession as boys in German boarding-schools 
often do to-day. Lessons and another dress parade 
were followed by supper and bed. Occasionally 
when the fancy struck him the duke would make a 
nightly visitation to the dormitories, and indeed he 
was so fascinated by his pedagogical whimsies that 
he had founded a similar school for girls, which he 
had judiciously placed under the patronage of the 
reigning favorite, Baroness Leustrum. 

Of course the caged birds of the Solitude came to 
have a passion for liberty, and longed to cast off all 
restraint. Schiller pined and grew sickly. He spent 
considerable intervals in the school hospital, and in 
these periods of leisure he practised his juvenile pen 
and read much, especially in Shakspere, though it is 
said that he was attached also to " Emilia Galotti " 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



223 



and " Werther," as well as to the then popular Klop- 
stock, — a variety of literary pabulum which bears 
witness to an omnivorous hunger rather than to a 
catholic taste. A little later he fell upon Klinger and 
Leisewitz, the protagonists of " Storm and Stress." 

Schiller had been two years at Solitude when the 
duke removed the school to Stuttgart (1775), and here 
Schiller began the study of medicine; but he con- 
tinued his poetic essays and was cheered a few years 
later by the visit to the academy of Goethe (1779), 
who had already proclaimed such bold words of freedom 
as the young man of twenty felt stirring in his own 
heart. For it was about this time that Schiller set 
seriously to work on the first of his published plays, 
" Die Eauber," the most noted protest against existing 
political conditions, the most ringing demand for a 
revision of ethical and moral standards, in all this 
storm-tossed period. But while it has the enthusiasm 
of youth, it does not escape juvenile weakness. The 
characters seem taken from plays that he had read, or 
from his fellow-pupils. Karl Moor, the robber hero, 
was what Schiller at that moment aspired to be. 
" Put me at the head of an army of fellows like my- 
self," he exclaims, " and Germany shall be a republic, 
by the side of which Eome and Sparta were nunne- 
ries." To write this political declamation Schiller 
was obliged to steal moments from study. At times 
he feigned sickness, composing with a medical book 
at hand in which to hide his work. But he was not 
neglecting his professional studies the while, — in 
any case not so seriously as to make him fail in his 



224 



MODEHN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



graduation, which brought his eight years of school 
life to a close (Dec. 14, 1780). 

He was not yet free, however. The duke had edu- 
cated him for the public service, and Schiller was now 
called on to serve out his time as regimental surgeon, 
a position almost as distasteful to him as the one that 
he had left. The very dress galled him. His friend 
Soharffenstein tells how at this time " he was cramped 
into a uniform of the old Prussian cut. . . . His little 
military hat barely covered his crown, behind it hung 
a long cue, while round his neck was screwed a horse- 
hair stock several sizes too small. . . . Owing to the 
padding of his long white gaiters, his legs seemed 
thicker at the calf than at the thigh. Moving about 
stiffly in these blacking-stained gaiters, he reminded 
one irresistibly of a stork." But at last he could re- 
visit his family, and that must have been a great 
consolation, for he had not seen his parents for eight 
years. 

The " Eauber " was now approaching completion, 
but it was preceded in publication by a poem on the 
death of his friend Weckerlin, which naturally scan- 
dalized the pious souls of Stuttgart, for it showed the 
young surgeon in no Christian mood, but filled with 
a bitter defiance of society and society's creed. But 
if in literature he seemed now more likely to win 
notoriety than fame, in medicine his repute was so 
bad that his superior cautioued the apothecary to put 
up no more of his prescriptions without approval. 
Perhaps he had no ambition to excel in this field. 
On the other hand, publishers had no wish to burn 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



225 



their fingers with so risky a thing as the " Robbers," 
and Schiller finally printed it at his own expense, as 
Goethe had done with " Gotz." 

Once printed, however, the play made Schiller a 
literary lion, for like " Werther," it chimed with the 
unrest of this ante-revolutionary decade. He was 
soon commissioned to prepare it for the stage, and it 
was produced at Mannheim, Jan. 13, 1782, where it 
was received with great applause, though its length 
had made it necessary to begin the performance at five 
in the afternoon. 

The "Robbers" is a protest against conventional 
ideas and the unbearable tyranny of the German 
petty princes. There was something characteristic 
in the motto of the second printed edition, " in tyran- 
nos" beneath a rampant lion. " Law," says its chief 
character, Moor, the robber and student of Plutarch, 
" never yet educated a man of true greatness. Free- 
dom produces the grand, the exceptional." This 
Moor, who is practically an anarchist, has been falsely 
traduced to his father by his brother, a smug, schem- 
ing, respectable scoundrel, Edmund by name, Joseph 
Surface by nature, who now writes to inform him 
that he is disowned by his father. Wild with rage 
at this wrong, Karl .proposes to avenge himself on 
society at large, and with a robber band proceeds to 
the Bohemian wood, where they find more to plunder 
than one might have expected in the days of Emperor 
Maximilian and the Universal Peace. Gold and 
rings abound in their treasury as in the hoard of an 
old German king, horses bathe in wine, bravery vies 

15 



226 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



with atrocity, magnanimity with greed. Karl can 
even be sentimental. He knows that world-agony 
which was quite foreign to his prototype, Eobin 
Hood. Surely neither Eobin nor his merry men 
could ever have conceived themselves like Schiller's 
hero as set apart by fate to be that bull of ancient 
fable " in whose glowing belly mankind was put to 
roast." Nor would that prince of archers have com- 
prehended Karl when he exclaims: "With weeping 
and (mashing teeth I learn that two such men as I 
would shatter the whole structure of the moral world." 
But this bombast is in the spirit of the carnival of 
" Storm and Stress." 

By a rather forced and unnatural series of events 
the robber discovers his father, who has been impris- 
oned in the dungeon of his brother's castle. This 
scene, the strongest in the play, inspired Coleridge's 
fine sonnet " To the Author of the ' Kobbers.' " He 
would have wished to die after writing such a scene, 
he said, "lest in some after-moment aught more mean 
might stamp me mortal." Possibly Coleridge, in 
saying this, had the rest of this very play in his 
mind, for indeed much of it is calculated to make the 
judicious grieve. Karl now determines to storm the 
castle of his wicked brother, who spends the watches 
of that night in uneasy visions, or discourses to his 
servant and his chaplain of judgment to come, and 
at last kills himself just as the robbers are about to 
capture him. But the rescued father, on discovering 
Karl's vocation, against which he cherished excusable 
prejudices, dies of silent grief. Nor is this enough ; 



schiller's eaely years. 



227 



in capturing the castle Karl has rescued his lady-love ; 
but since the robbers insist that he shall remain their 
leader and shall not marry her, he proceeds to kill 
her, and then surrenders himself to the police, first 
arranging with cynical philanthropy that the price 
set on his head shall fall to a poor laborer struggling 
to support his eleven children. 

This unvarnished tale of the "Kobbers" is obvi- 
ously absurd, unnatural, and at times ridiculous. 
The style, too, was as rough and unpolished as the 
plot ; and the action, abounding in bombast and blood, 
would now appeal chiefly to the ears and eyes of the 
"groundlings." But in its day the " Kobbers " roused 
great excitement and enthusiasm in very different 
social circles, and the ranting Karl bade fair to rival 
the melancholy Werther. Goethe might well have 
been disgusted beyond measure, as we know he was, 
at the hold the play maintained on the German pub- 
lic. 1 Later in life the Olympian became more philo- 
sophically tolerant of such pranks of literary child- 
hood. But to Goethe the active privy-counsellor, and 
still more to Goethe when he returned from Italy, in 
1788, it seemed a wanton shaking of the foundations 
of society, whose success he could not but deplore. 
The nobles, indeed, stood coolly aloof, but the en- 
thusiasm of the burgher class for the " Kobbers " and 
its kin was not stilled in Germany till it was awed 
into silence by the orgies of the great Revolution. 

1 Eckermann, Conversations, Jan. 17, 1827. Perhaps he sym- 
pathized a little with that prince who told him that " had he been 
God and had foreseen that Schiller would write the 'Rauber,' he 
would not have created the world." 



228 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



One may imagine that Schiller's ducal patron was 
not greatly edified at this cry of revolt and revolu- 
tionary harangue. He seized the occasion of a sur- 
reptitious visit of his army surgeon to Mannheim to 
sentence him to two weeks' arrest, and soon after when 
the Swiss canton Grisons (Graubiinden) sapiently com- 
plained that it had been insulted in the play, for 
their land had been called the "Kobbers' Athens," 
the irritated prince forbade his publishing anything 
whatever. But Schiller was now in the full swing of 
youthful fecundity and had advanced far in the com- 
position of a Venetian drama, " Fieseo." He was 
already earning a greater sum from his pen than his 
surgeon's pay, and if either occupation must be aban- 
doned he could not hesitate. . The duke would listen 
to no compromise, nor would he allow the poet to 
surrender his commission. 

Schiller, to save his genius, impetuously resolved 
on flight. His father was a government official, and 
he did not think it prudent to acquaint him with the 
project, but he took an affectionate farewell of his 
mother the evening before he had determined on his 
departure. His friend Streicher was to accompany 
him ; but when this fid us Achates appeared the next 
morning at the appointed hour he found Schiller's 
trunk unpacked and the poet occupied in attempting 
an imitation of an ode by Klopstock that he insisted 
on reading to Streicher, together witli his own lines, 
before he would consent to begin his preparations. 
So it was not till evening that they set out in a car- 
riage, armed with one broken and one tlintless pistol, 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



229 



and having fifty-one gulden between them. They 
drove all night, halting in the middle of their journey 
at Entzvveiungen for midnight coffee, which Schiller 
accompanied by reading aloud certain manuscript 
poems. They crossed the Wurteniberg frontier in 
the morning. Once in safety he tried in vain to 
negotiate for a compromise. The ducal martinet 
would hear of nothing but return to the service. 

So there followed a dark time of exile from family 
and home, during which Schiller lived in poverty, and 
even had recourse to the assistance of friends, while 
he tried in vain to adapt " Fiesco " to the demands of 
the theatrical manager, Dalberg. At last he sold the 
play for the trifle of ten louis, and began with fresh 
enthusiasm to work on a new drama, "Kabale und 
Liebe." And now he found a generous patron in 
Frau von Wolzogen and an asylum at her country 
house at Bauerbach. Here he stayed eight months, 
still working on " Kabale und Liebe," and beginning 
another play on Don Carlos, the son of Philip II., 
whose tragic fate had interested him for some years, 
as appears from his letters. He employed his gentle 
leisure also in falling in love with his patron's 
daughter, but the passion was quickly and effectually 
nipped by the watchful mamma. She remained his 
friend, however, and at length aided him to establish 
himself at Mannheim, where there was prospect that 
his new plays might see the footlights (July, 1783). 
Offers of permanent engagement there were also 
made to him, and his sanguine temperament made 
him consider them brilliant. At last, in January, 



230 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



1784, " Fiesco " was put on the stage, with changes 
suggested by Dalberg, that were not entirely to its 
advantage from an aesthetic or popular standpoint. 

Whatever may have been Schiller's hopes, " Fiesco " 
was, and deserved to be, a fiasco. But it was not al- 
together its faults that caused its failure. The pic- 
ture of the corrupt court life of Germany, though 
disguised, as in " Emilia Galotti" beneath an Italian, 
and in this case an historical veil, as well as the demo- 
cratic tendency of the piece, no longer social, as in 
the " Bobbers," but frankly political, presumed a more 
developed republican and radical sentiment than the 
Meiningen public offered or indeed would tolerate. 
Besides, the play lacked intrinsic value. History might 
be set at naught, but dramatic unity was not attained. 
No character in the play could rouse enthusiasm, 
least of all the hero. And yet " Fiesco " is Schiller's 
introduction to the historical drama in which his 
great success was to be achieved. 

In " Kabale und Liebe," or Plot and Passion, as 
the words are sometimes rendered, Schiller won more 
immediate success. Here the mask of " Fiesco " was 
thrown aside and German political abuses were at- 
tacked at home. It was a genuinely national play, 
and struck immediately a popular chord. The cen- 
tral idea of a marriage between persons of widely 
differing social spheres was indeed threadbare. It had 
been used by Diderot, and was already copied from 
him in German) 7 . But Schiller's treatment of the 
theme presents several original features. The scene 
is laid in a petty German court. Ferdinand, the 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



231 



chancellor's son, loves Louise Miller, the fiddler's 
daughter. The chancellor wants his son to marry 
the prince's English mistress, a lady, like Portia, " of 
wondrous virtues," who combines her court functions 
with a tender love for Ferdinand, though his father 
is not influenced by this, but by purely selfish mo- 
tives. Such a canvas gave Schiller free scope to 
paint the low and cruel intrigues of court life, and 
in his picture he has fearlessly introduced the scan- 
dalous sale of mercenary troops so common during 
these years of the American Eevolution. But all the 
arts of the courtier are employed in vain against the 
fair Louise. She remains spotless, even when Ferdi- 
nand is deceived into doubting her purity, and, des- 
perate at the thought, poisons both himself and her. 
In dying he becomes convinced of her innocence, and 
has still strength to give his father some home truths 
that point the moral of the inevitable conflict between 
the frivolous society that was even now hanging on 
the brink of its ruin and the democratic passions that 
were to emancipate the new era, the era of " Gotz " 
and " Werther," and of the Eevolution. 

In " Kabale und Liebe " there is a restless social 
discontent such as is to be found in Goethe's work 
before the Weimar period. But it is even more pro- 
nounced here, and there is more of Swift's smva 
indignatio, as one might expect from the external 
conditions of the work of the younger poet. It is 
natural to compare " Kabale und Liebe " with Les- 
sing's "Miss Sara Sampson," which till then had been 
the best German play of modern life. Schiller's work 



232 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



is the stronger and deeper. It rests less on the tragic 
situations that social conventions produce than on 
the grander passions of human nature that supersede 
them and cast them aside. But it is more fruitful to 
compare it to " Emilia Galotti," which may even 
have affected the phraseology in many places, and 
certainly furnished models for several of the char- 
acters, here as in " Fiesco." 1 

During all this period Schiller was constantly har- 
assed by creditors and by ill-health. The latter was 
his misfortune, the former largely his fault. His 
essentially unpractical nature found it hard to com- 
prehend that there was any necessary relation between 
income and outgo. His work, paid for in advance, 
weighed on him, and his hopeless love, though stifled, 
had left a desolate place in his heart. To crown all, 
he had to endure the constant opposition of his 
father, a thorough philistine, who understood neither 
his son nor his genius, and would have had him, even 
now, return to his surgeon's practice at Stuttgart. 
But nothing could swerve him from his literary 
career. 

Wieland was the critic whose voice at this time 
had most weight with Schiller, and it was a result of 
his teaching that the young dramatist undertook to 
turn his " Don Carlos " into blank verse ; but while 
occupied in this laborious task he made the acquaint- 
ance of Major von Kalb and his fascinating wife, 
Charlotte, a talented and " emancipated " friend of 
Wieland's Sophie von Laroche and Goethe's Frau 

1 See Kuno Vischer, Lessiiig als Reformator, i. 1S6 seq. 



schillek's eaely years. 



233 



von Stein. This acquaintance was to have consider- 
able results for him later ; but now, since his engage- 
ment at Mannheim was not renewed, he seems to 
have welcomed the opportunity to exchange that 
town, connected with disappointment as well as 
glory, for the cultured society of Leipzig, where his 
work had already won him warm friends. 

Schiller left Mannheim in April, 1785. His two 
years' stay had enriched German literature with three 
plays, now classical, and two poems of considerable 
merit, " Die Kindermorderin " and "Die Schlacht;" 
but it had left him deeper in debt and in obligation 
to his friends than ever before. He had passed 
through the darkest period of his life, however, and 
went now to happier days and a more congenial circle 
of friends than he had yet known. He lived for 
nearly two years in close intimacy with Korner, 
father of the patriot poet of u Leier und Schwert," 
and with the group of literary men that Korner's 
discriminating appreciation had drawn about him. 
The time was passed partly at Leipzig, later at 
Dresden. It was under these influences that Schiller 
was inspired with that " Ode to Joy " that Beethoven 
has chosen for the close of his Choral Symphony. 
The morbid spirit of Mannheim has given place to 
an equally excessive hopefulness, which is a charac- 
teristic more frequently found in those pre-revolu- 
tionary years than in our more sober time. 

Yet even under these favoring auspices Schiller had 
many distractions, and " Don Carlos " grew slowly. 
It was interrupted, too, by historical and philosophi- 



234 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



cal studies, and by preliminary work on the " Geis- 
terseher," an unfinished attempt at romance. He 
conceived also during these years a brief but ardent 
passion for Henriette von Arnim, though it was 
marred somewhat by the interference of her too eager 
and meddlesome mother. Still, these feelings were 
not allowed to interrupt the placid platonism of his 
attachment for Charlotte von Kalb, which indeed 
survived the intenser love, and brought him at length 
to Weimar, in July, 1787. 

The most important result of the Dresden years 
was " Don Carlos," which he finished in May, 1787. 
This achieved a success almost as sensational as the 
"Robbers/' and quite eclipsed for the time being 
" Kabale und Liebe," though the latter is probably 
more acted now, and certainly, in its fundamental 
ideas, is less discordant with the modern philosophy 
of life. For men to-day are disposed to a skeptical, 
if not cynical intolerance of such political shibboleths 
as Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and of the triumphant 
democratic confidence of Schiller's Marquis Posa and 
the other heralds of the French Revolution. We are 
disillusioned in this last decade of the nineteenth 
century. 

" Don Carlos " bears clear traces of the different 
moods that produced it. As in Goethe's " Egmont " 
the German and Italian spirit were not fused into a' 
unified whole, so here the joyful anticipations of a 
golden age that shed their hopeful effulgence over 
the sanguine poet at Dresden did not altogether 
transform a play that had been conceived in the 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



235 



bitter, rebellious temper of " Fiesco." In the original 
scheme Don Carlos was to have been the hero, and 
his love for Elizabeth of Valois, now his father's wife, 
but once his own betrothed, should furnish the tragic 
theme, as in fact this love had led to the imprison- 
ment and death of the historic Carlos. But into this 
plan there was now intruded a political element. 
Marquis Posa, the republican idealist, self-styled 
" ambassador of all humanity," replaces in Carlos's 
heart the love of Elizabeth, with his sublimated patri- 
otic enthusiasm and visions of liberty for the Nether- 
lands. To the modern reader the hare-brained 
characters of Carlos and of Posa quite deprive them 
of sympathy, for one feels that power in their hands 
could not fail to be abused ; and thus one is half recon- 
ciled with the court intrigue to which they finally suc- 
cumb. Yet it is only just to observe that this was 
much less likely to be felt in 1787 than now. They 
had not then seen the Posas of real life, the amiable 
Girondins, make shipwreck of themselves and their 
cause. And in this drama their mobile fancy was 
caught by many winged words which suited well an 
age that clutched at glittering political generalities. 
Such, for instance, was Posa's declaration : " I love 
humanity. Beneath a monarch I can love none other 
than myself." Or again : " This century is not ripe 
for my ideal. I live a citizen of those that are to 
come." This enthusiasm Of fantastic unreality, a la 
Eousseau, so genuine, so heartfelt, and yet so patheti- 
cally preposterous in this world of ours, this fools' 
paradise in " Cloud-Cookoo-Town," built on credulity 



236 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



and ignorance of history and human nature rather 
than on study and sober faith, is unspeakably sad to 
those whom bitter experience has enlightened. An 
impatient curl of the lip replaces to-day the passionate 
enthusiasm that once brought crowded audiences to 
their feet in tumultuous applause. 

The success of " Don Carlos " gave Schiller a fame 
even beyond the borders of Germany. It was this 
that earned him, five years later (Aug. 26, 1792), the 
questionable honor of French citizenship under the 
somewhat distorted name of " Gilleers." Meantime 
Schiller might well have high hopes in turning, even 
though uncalled, to Weimar. The duke was known 
as a patron of letters. Indeed he had already given 
Schiller a title. Goethe was in Italy and would not 
overshadow his younger fame, while he may have 
felt that he could not have counted on his sympathy 
in any case. So the occasion seemed favorable. And 
besides, though Karl August was for the moment 
absent, Charlotte von Kalb was there. 

Schiller was warmly received in the mutual admi- 
ration club of Weimar literary society. It would 
have been difficult for them to refuse recognition to 
a noted litterateur who in his turn had so much faith 
in the power of that charmed camaraderie as to 
prophesy that in a century the fame of Professor 
Eeinhold, of Jena, Wieland's son-in-law, would eclipse 
that of Christ. Herder and Wieland he found es- 
pecially cordial ; but in spite of this, and for motives 
that it is not altogether easy to see, he turned for a 
time wholly from the drama and poetry and buried 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



237 



liimself deep in historic investigations concerning the 
revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, with such dili- 
gence that he was able to publish a first volume in 
1788. This work gave him a title to scholarly con- 
sideration. At the same time he completed as much 
as he ever wrote of the " Geisterseher," whose pur- 
pose was to show the narrow bounds that separate 
superstition and infidelity, — a subject of some inter- 
est in the age of Cagliostro and of Voltaire. More 
significant, if not more important, are the short poems 
of this period, especially " Die Kunstler " and " Die 
G otter Griechenlands," for they mark the beginnings 
of the classical influences that were soon to change 
the whole character of his work. 

Schiller found no lack of fame in Weimar, but he 
was still much in want of money, and the duke's re- 
turn (October, 1787) had not brought him any realiza- 
tion of his hopes of patronage, in spite of his historical 
studies. It is possible that this was the cause of 
his turning again to pure literature and criticism as 
a means of winning a recognized position. Soon 
after, Wieland took him on the staff of his journal, 
"Die Deutsche Merkur," which was an assistance in 
this direction. But it is noteworthy that all his 
dramatic work of the later time has a strong histori- 
cal turn, and this after careful reflection, for he writes 
in a letter to Goethe, January 5, 1798 : " I grant that 
I should not choose any subjects but historical ones. 
Freely invented ones would be dangerous ground to 
me. It is quite a different thing to idealize what is 
realistic, and to realize what is ideal ; and this is 



238 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



what has actually to be done in free fiction. I know 
it to be within my power to animate and give warmth 
to any given subject that is definite and limited, and, 
so to speak, to make it sprout up ; whereas the ob- 
jective definiteness of such a subject would curb my 
imagination and be an obstacle to my wishes." He 
was slow, however, in poetic production. He seems 
to have felt the need of a deeper culture before lie 
could satisfy his new self, and twelve years separate 
" Don Carlos " from " Wallenstein," his next drama, 
which is also his greatest. Meantime he is busily 
studying Euripides and Homer, and preparing him- 
self to be the friend of Goethe. 

But the emotional side of Schiller's nature was to 
find its counterpart before the intellectual companion- 
ship was given him. He had seized the occasion of 
the absence of his friend, Charlotte von Kalb, from 
Weimar, to make a visit to his old patron, Fran von 
Wolzogeu, at Meiningen and Bauerbach. His return 
was eventful, for it brought him to Budolstadt and 
to the house of the Lengenfelds, whose daughter, 
Charlotte, was to be his wife. It is curious that but 
a few months before Schiller should have written to 
his old friend, Korner, to consult him regarding mar- 
riage in the abstract. At that time Korner had cau- 
tioned him against his vivid imagination. But 
certainly it did not run away with him in Budol- 
stadt, for he writes with delightful impartiality that 
the two Lengenfeld sisters, Caroline and Charlotte, 
"are both attractive and please me much. I find 
them well acquainted with all the new literature ; 



SCHILLElt'S EARLY YEARS. 



239 



they are refined, and have both sense and sensibility. 
They play the piano well, which made my evening a 
very pleasant one." The judicious may, perhaps, 
find more indication of the future in his further re- 
mark : " I have already lost the inclination for mar- 
riage. I favored it from motives of necessity. I 
could never be happy with any woman of note, or I 
mistake myself." But then Charlotte Lengenfeld 
was not " of note," and a little later he has discovered : 
" I need a being about me and belonging to me whom 
I can and must make happy, and in whose existence 
I can reflect my own." Soon after we find him com- 
plaining that he is overworked, and counting the cost 
of housekeeping, possibly at Jena. By the beginning 
of 1788, his heart was fixed at Budolstadt, though he 
has the sweet simplicity to write to Koruer that : 
"Even Charlotte (von Kalb), who sees through me, 
and watches me narrowly, has no suspicion of it." 
It was this healthy, natural love that stirred in 
Schiller the more realistic notes of the " Gotter Grie- 
chenlands," just as Christiane inspired Goethe's " Eo- 
man Elegies." The joy of life that both poems breathe 
is essentially classical, and they are almost contempo- 
raneous, which is a curious coincidence. 

In this mood Schiller set seriously to work to 
write himself out of debt if possible. With God's 
help he "would make a thoroughly fresh start at 
Easter." It was now that he first met Goethe (Sept. 
7, 1788), who, as has been said, was not prepossessed 
in his favor, and treated him with distant courtesy, 
intensified soon after by Schiller's frank criticism of 



240 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



" Egmont." Of this meeting, Schiller writes to Korner : 
" On the whole, my great idea of Goethe has not suf- 
fered by personal acquaintance, but I doubt whether 
we shall ever approach each other closely. Much 
that is still interesting to me and that I have still to 
wish and hope for, is no longer of importance to him. 
He is so far ahead of me, less in years than in ex- 
perience, that we shall never meet on our separate 
paths. His whole nature is different from mine, his 
world is not mine, our ways of thought seem essen- 
tially different." But Schiller did not realize how 
rapidly he was now moving himself toward the posi- 
tion that Goethe came to take after the Italian jour- 
ney. And on his side Goethe did not realize this 
change in Schiller at all. To him Schiller was still 
the author of the " Robbers " and " Don Carlos," 
though now his picture could have been more justly 
seen in the stately verse and clear-cut conceptions of 
" Die Kiinstler," his latest poem, written at Rudolstadt 
under the bright inspiration of the Lengenfelds. 

Though unwilling to encourage the poet, Goethe 
was glad to aid the historian to an adjunct professor- 
ship at the University of Jena, then the chief centre 
of German culture. The post carried with it, indeed, 
no fixed salary, but it gave Schiller a coveted recog- 
nition and a social position that was grateful to him. 
But Goethe was careful that the new professor should 
not misunderstand their relation, and when Schiller 
called to offer his thanks and express the customary 
diffidence as to his qualifications, he was grimly told 
that " in teaching one learns." 



schiller's early years. 241 

The appointment was an honor, but yet not with- 
out embarrassment. Schiller writes to Korner : " I 
am in fearful straits, as, owing to the many, many 
tasks which never can be finished tins winter, I can 
make only hasty preparations (for the University 
lectures). Then, again, my position as professor will 
involve many new expenses . . . and this year I can 
spare least of all the necessary time for study. To be 
sure, after this gloomy period my future will be a 
brighter one, for now at length my lot seems cast." 
So his time was chiefly occupied in fitting himself 
for his new post, while critical journalism furnished 
a rather precarious support. In his brooding the 
idea even occurred to him that Goethe had shelved 
him at Jena that he might reign undisturbed at Wei- 
mar. At times he spoke very harshly and surely un- 
justly of him: " This man, this Goethe is in my way," 
he writes, "ever reminding me how hardly I have 
been dealt with by fate. . . . There is now no retriev- 
ing all that has been lost." Again he says : " Goethe 
excites me to a peculiar mixture of hatred and love, 
somewhat like that which Brutus and Cassius must 
have felt for Caesar." So he wrote to Korner. To 
Charlotte von Lengenfeld, already his closest friend, 
and soon to be his betrothed, he wrote almost de- 
fiantly : " If once I am in a position to let all my 
energies have play, he, and others, too, will get to 
know me just as I know his spirit." It was precisely 
the feeling that he had not such a position that 
galled him constantly. When Korner asked him to 
write an epic on Frederic the Great, he answers : 

16 



242 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



"Get me a wife with 12,000 thalers, a wife with 
whom I could live, to whom I could cling, and in 
five years I '11 write you a Fredericiade, a classic 
tragedy, and a half-dozen fine odes into the bargain, 
since you are so set on them." There is a truth in 
Schiller's feeling. Great work is rarely produced 
amid petty cares. 

Though Schiller's historical writings are outside 
the field of pure literature, some notice of them, as of 
scientific studies in Goethe's case, belongs to the ap- 
preciation of his genius. When he was appointed 
lie had expressed a fear, not without just cause, that 
many students would know more history than he; 
and he frankly confesses that to him " history is only 
a store-house for the imagination. Events must be 
content with whatever treatment they get at my 
ha,nds." This does not raise high scholarly expecta- 
tions, nor would such be gratified by a reading of his 
" Netherlands " or of the " Thirty Years' War " which 
now soon followed. It is quite true that the standard 
of historical writing in Germany at this time was 
low; but Schiller did not even attain that respect- 
able mediocrity. He undertook to write Dutch his- 
tory, and did not even bestir himself to learn Dutch. 
But on the other hand, the influence of historical 
study, however superficial, on one so prone as Schiller 
to the idealistic and visionary was not without great 
profit, and the popularity of his histories in Germany 
trained their readers to demand a higher standard of 
artistic composition, and a greater mastery of style 
than they had been wont to look for or to find in the 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



243 



scholarly work of that generation. Then, too, the 
"Thirty Years' War" was written to order for a 
" Ladies' Almanach," and so it helped to widen the 
circle of readers that could be interested in national 
history, — a most important thing in the trying times 
that were at hand. 

Schiller's introductory lecture at Jena was received 
with loud applause and followed by the rare honor of 
a student serenade. His own description of the 
scene is dramatic enough to warrant its quotation : 
" By half-past five," he writes, " the auditorium was 
filled. From Eeinhold's window I saw troop after 
troop coming up the street, as if they would never 
end. Though not quite without nervousness, I was 
glad to see the growing crowd, and it rather strength- 
ened my courage. I had steeled myself into a cer- 
tain firmness, being no little helped by the thought 
that my lecture need shun no comparison with any 
other delivered in Jena, and more than all by the 
consciousness that all my hearers would confess my 
superiority. But as the throng grew ever greater, so 
that hall and stairways were crowded and many 
turned away from the door, some one near me sug- 
gested that for this lecture I should use another hall. 
I let the proposal be made that I should lecture at 
Grieszbach's (which would hold three or four hun- 
dred). . . . Then there was a droll scene. Every- 
body rushed out, pell-mell, down the street, and the 
Johannisstrasse, one of the largest in Jena, was quite 
filled with students. And as they ran at full speed 
so as to get good places at Grieszbach's, there was 



244 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



alarm in all the streets and bustling at every window. 
At first people thought it was a fire, and the castle 
guard shared in the general excitement. What is it ? 
What's the matter ? .was asked by all. Then came 
the cry : The new professor is going to lecture ! . . . 
I felt as though I was running the gauntlet. . . . 
The hall was full, so full that an anteroom and a 
passage leading to the front entrance were both 
blocked up, while many of the audience stood on the 
side stairs. So I walked in along an avenue of spec- 
tators and listeners and could hardly find my speaker's 
chair, which I took amid loud pounding which counts 
here as applause. ... At the first ten words that I 
could repeat in a firm tone I got entire control of my 
face and read on with a strength and sureness of voice 
that was surprising even to myself." 

The first lecture had been very carefully prepared, 
and produced so great an impression that five hundred 
gathered to hear his second, and the numbers con- 
tinued good for the first term. But these were free- 
lectures, and when in the next term fees began to be 
charged, the audience dropped immediately to thirty, 
from whom he might hope to collect fifty dollars in 
all for the half year. But while he was still flushed 
with the success of the former series, Schiller's san- 
guine enthusiasm had brought him to the critical 
point of a formal betrothal with Charlotte, which en- 
raged beyond measure Frau von Kalb, who, as it 
seems, was even then scheming a divorce from her 
husband that she might marry him herself. It was 
just two weeks after the fall of the Bastile, " a fore- 



schiller's early years. 



245 



taste, so it seemed to Charlotte's sister, Caroline, " of 
the victory of freedom over tyranny," and so most 
appropriate "at the beginning of a charming love- 
affair." Its course was not altogether smooth, how- 
ever. Beside the fuming Von Kalb was Korner, the 
old faithful friend, a little piqued that he had not 
been taken earlier and more fully into Schiller's con- 
fidence ; and, worse than all, Charlotte could not fail 
to view with alarm Schiller's attentions to the witty 
Caroline. Indeed, he seems to have had a touch of 
what Jean Paul calls "simultaneous love." As one 
of his biographers 1 has said : " If you take his letters 
literally it would seem that he really did not care the 
turn of a penny which of the two he married, though 
he would have preferred to marry both." Schiller 
writes to Charlotte with more judicial calmness than 
we look for in a lover : " Caroline is nearer to me in 
age, and then her thoughts, her feelings, are more on 
a level with mine. She has worked more upon my 
sense for utterance than you, Lotte mine. But for 
all the world I would not have you other than you 
are. Those advantages which Caroline has you must 
get from me ; in my love your being must develop 
itself, you must be my creation, your season of blos- 
soming must fall in the spring-time of my love. 
Had we found each other later, you would have 
robbed me of this delight of watching you bloom to 
perfect beauty for me." How strange such wooing 
would seem now-a-days. Tempora mutantur, nos et 
mutamur in Mis. 

1 Nevinson, Schiller, 78. 



246 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



The financial barriers to their union were turned 
aside by the kind offices of Frau von Stein, who 
procured for Schiller a competent pension of two 
hundred thalers from the duke ; and so in February, 
1790, they were married, not in Jena, but in the 
dilapidated church of the hamlet Wenigenjena across 
the Saale, whereby they saved publicity and fees. 
"The scene was very short," Schiller says; but it 
opened a vista of untroubled wedded happiness for 
the fifteen years that remained to him. The compli- 
cations with Caroline never became serious, and Char- 
lotte gave him that home companionship which was 
at first the stay, then, as sickness came, the support 
of his genius. 

The first warning of approaching invalidism was 
a severe illness in 1791. This may have been in- 
duced by over study, for he tells us he had been 
accustomed to work fourteen hours a day. From this 
sickness he never wholly recovered, and from now till 
his death he was seldom free from pain and always 
liable to acute attacks and prolonged periods of sleep- 
lessness. His slender financial resources were nearly 
exhausted by his illness and convalescence, but he 
was magnanimously relieved of anxiety on that score 
by the annual gift, of a thousand thalers for three 
years from Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, 
that he might have the leisure necessary to his re- 
covery. Joyfully he set about paying arrears of 
debts, abandoned his distasteful lectures, and, with 
leisurely purpose and assured steps, began, as lie 
wrote to Korner, " to write for eternity," — words 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



247 



said, perhaps, in jest, but yet as likely to be realized 
as any prophecy of literary fame. 

It was characteristic of the time that one of the 
first uses Schiller should make of the gift of leisure 
was to plunge himself deep in the philosophy of 
Kant, which then ruled what Eichter called " the 
German kingdom of the air," with Jena as its chief 
stronghold. It is curious and significant to find 
these abtruse metaphysics the subject not alone of 
youthful enthusiasm but even of poetic inspiration. 
But it was not in Kant's great works, the Critiques 
of Pure and Practical Reason, that Schiller found 
most satisfaction. For that he lacked the necessary 
metaphysical training. It was Kant's " Theory of 
Esthetics," in the first part of the " Power of Judg- 
ment," that drew his attention to a subject which 
had already attracted the best powers of Lessiug and 
Herder. 

For four years (1792-1796) most of Schiller's prose 
work is in this field, on which he also now lectured 
at the university. His aesthetic essays were published 
in the literary journals " Thalia " and " Die Horen," 
under various titles. They were greeted by the dis- 
ciples of Kant with characteristic diversity of judg- 
ment, according as each disciple thought that Schiller 
agreed or disagreed witli their master, whom all were 
determined to follow though they could not concur 
as to where he was leading them. Fichte said 
Schiller's work was fit only for amateurs. The dig- 
nity of his philosophy was outraged by anything so 
clear and artistic in form. Others, however, found 



248 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



that Schiller had obscured the " heavenly simplicity " 
of Kant. His essays are, at least, intelligible and. 
important contributions to the development of the 
science of taste and criticism. The most remarkable 
among them is that on " Naive and Sentimental 
Poetry/' written in 1795-1796, after Schiller had 
come under the influence of Goethe. Here he is 
among the first to observe the attraction that nature 
has for modern poets, while there is hardly any trace 
of this among the Greeks, — facts that he would ex- 
plain by the growing divergence of social from natural 
life. Thus ancient poetry is naively natural, modern 
poetry is ideal, often artificially so. It is sentimental. 
Naive poets, such as Homer and Shakspere, appeal 
to us by nature, by sensuous truth, by living im- 
pressions ; sentimental poets appeal to us by ideas. 
Goethe, Schiller said, could give naive form to senti- 
mental subjects, and so combined the ancient and 
modern schools. This essay was in many ways the 
foundation of modern aesthetic criticism in Germany, 
as well as the starting-point of the romantic school. 1 
But the Schlegels pushed this idea to an extreme, 
and made of Schiller's sentimental idealism the ro- 
manticism which was the contradiction of his classic 
ideals in literature. 

Later in life Schiller regretted the time he had 
given to metaphysical speculation and the effect that 
it had had on his mind. " The poet is the only true 
man," he then wrote to Goethe in a connection that 

1 Compare Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann, March 21, 
1830. 



schiller's eaely years. 



249 



will appear later; "the best philosopher is only a 
caricature in comparison." And Goethe in a more 
judicial way was disposed to agree with him. The 
aesthetic lectures, however, came to a forced and 
abrupt close in the spring of 1793. Schiller passed 
the following year wandering in search of health. 
He revisited Stuttgart and his old school at the Soli- 
tude. At Ludwigsburg his first child was born. He 
saw his parents, too, old but hale, and in May, 1794, 
he was again in Jena. 

This journey marks the close of the first period of 
Schiller's literary life, the period of experiment, of 
growth, and development. In this respect it sug- 
gests comparison with Goethe's Italian journey, 
though that was a direct cause of change, which this 
was not. Had Schiller died, as seemed for a time 
probable, in 1792, he would indeed have claimed a 
considerable place in German literature, but not 
among the highest. The achievements for which he 
was to become a household word in Germany were 
almost without exception yet to come when the poet 
returned, still feeble, to take up once more, as he 
supposed for the rest of his life, the uncongenial tasks 
of his professorship at Jena. But the long apprentice 
years were over. What remained of Schiller's life 
was to be brightened by one of the most precious 
friendships of which literary annals tell. In 1794 
Goethe and Schiller learned to know one another, 
and in that friendship Schiller found the pole-star of 
his genius. 

Before we follow him into this new and transform- 



250 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

ing relation it is well to pause a moment to ask what 
result for him came from those great events in France, 
which since 1789 had been shaking the pillars of the 
political world. The Schiller of the " Bobbers " had 
been himself an iconoclast, and years later he wrote 
gayly that if the French spoiled his hopes in Germany 
he might try what France would do for him. It has 
been already said, in speaking of Goethe, that pa- 
triotism, as we now understand it, formed but a 
small part of the individualistic creed of the eigh- 
teenth century. " We moderns," Schiller had written 
to Korner, in 1788, " have within our reach a kind of 
interest unknown to the Greeks and Bomans, with 
which the interest of patriotism cannot be for a mo- 
ment compared. This is important only for imma- 
ture nations, for the youth of the world." At first, 
therefore, the Bevolution in France attracted only 
moderate attention from the idealist, as compared 
with Kantian metaphysics. Even up to the execu- 
tion of Louis XVI. he sympathized mildly with the 
revolutionists. That event, however, gave him a 
rude shock, — " the butchers disgusted him so ; " and, 
though he never became a reactionary, he was from 
that time more conservative in his democracy, and 
toward the close of his life began to exchange his 
cosmopolitan sympathies for a lofty confidence in the 
destinies of his own German race. "The German 
has been unfortunate in war, but he has not lost his 
true worth. The German empire and the German 
people are two quite different things." He did not 
live to see his confidence justified by the war of lib- 



Schiller's early years. 



251 



eration ; but in his attitude we may find a valuable 
commentary on what, to our age, may seem perplex- 
ing in the position of Goethe. 

Soon after Schiller returned to Jena the great pub- 
lisher Cotta asked him to assume the management of 
a literary monthly at a salary that placed him above 
anxiety. And so Schiller, who had begun to " wish 
he could be more to Goethe," sought his co-operation 
in a letter that could not but gratify one who was 
feeling the isolation of his intellectual pinnacle. 
Goethe had every reason to hope for healthful stimu- 
lus from association with Schiller and with those who 
had been already gathered for the enterprise, and 
after a little delay, such as beseemed his literary dig- 
nity and social rank, he assured them of his aid. 
Then, in July, Goethe visited Jena, and as he walked 
with Schiller from the meeting of a scientific society 
they began to talk of art, and found to their surprise 
that they had very much in common, yet with such 
variety of ideas as to make their talk " an intellectual 
treat " to Goethe, while Schiller wrote that " each 
could give the other something he lacked and get 
something in return." 

Though this interchange of great minds may seem 
to have been long deferred, it could hardly have 
taken place earlier. Ever since 1787 Schiller had 
been feeling his way to a new intellectual and 
aBsthetic position. He now regarded much of his 
earlier work with puzzled dissatisfaction. He seems, 
too, to have lost confidence in his own creative poetic 
genius, and it was not till the author of the " Robbers " 



252 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



had reached this stage of self-knowledge that Goethe 
could give him the serenity of his broader vision of 
the world. But Schiller was of those who need 
sympathy to do their best work. And now beneath 
the sun of Goethe's friendship his whole nature blos- 
somed. " Every week," said Goethe to Eckermann, 
Schiller seemed a new and more complete man. Each 
time I saw him he seemed to me to have grown in 
reading, knowledge, judgment. He was a magnificent 
creation, and was taken from us at the very height of 
his powers." A magnificent creation, indeed, but in 
no small measure the creation of Goethe. 

Almost immediately their friendship grew to 
rounded completeness, and that wonderful corres- 
pondence begins, extending to more than a thousand 
letters, — a mine for the student of aesthetics and 
criticism, a monument to literary altruism. Soon 
Goethe invited Schiller to pass a fortnight at his 
house in Weimar, just at the auspicious time when 
the " Essay on Naive and Sentimental Poetry " was 
taking shape in Schiller's mind. They were con- 
stantly together, and talked, unreservedly of their 
work and plans, nor could the courtly Goethe have 
offered a more graceful eirenicon than the request 
that Schiller should adapt to the Weimar stage that 
" Egmont " that he had once criticised so keenly. 

Their new journal, " Die Horen," now formed a 
constant bond between the poets, though in itself it 
proved a source of annoyance and disappointment. 
Schiller's treacherous health prevented him from 
undertaking a large work ; and besides, he had been so 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



253 



long absorbed in aesthetics and metaphysics that he 
did not immediately recover his imaginative power. 
It is interesting, though not surprising, to find that 
these studious years had made the process of compo- 
sition more difficult. He writes : " I fear I have to 
do penance for the violent commotions into which 
my poetizing threw me. Half the man is enough for 
philosophizing . . . but your muses suck one dry." 
It was the first of many blessings that Goethe won 
him back to poetry again. This was the peculiar 
service of "Wilhelm Meister," which, as has been 
said, did not escape wholly unscathed from the not 
quite emancipated Schiller. The reading of this 
novel roused in him a creative fervor such as he 
had not known since his marriage, and during 1795 
several lyrics showed that his new aesthetic canons 
were leading him to higher achievements than he 
had yet won in this field. To this year belong " Die 
Ideale," and "Das Ideal und das Leben." "Der Spa- 
ziergang," written a little later, is the highest reach of 
his philosophical poetry, though still too metaphysi- 
cal to be his best. 

Meantime "Die Horen" not only absorbed much 
strength but provoked bitter attacks from the philis- 
tines of the commonplace on the one hand, and the 
lawless wildness of the romantic neo-Christian mystics 
on the other, with a chorus of muddled metaphysi- 
cians behind both. Subscriptions fell off sharply, so 
that after three years the journal, begun with such 
bright hopes, was, at Schiller's suggestion, abandoned. 
He had the experience of all editors who give their 



254 MODERN GERMA.N LITERATURE. 

public better work than they ask or desire. Still, the 
failure of their hopes for German culture could not but 
leave some bitterness behind, and the poets conceived 
the idea of answering the buzzing swarm of critics in 
a group of " Xenien," epigrams in Martial's manner, 
which they could publish in the " Musenalmanach " 
(1796). They printed some four hundred of these 
"parting gifts" to their critics, wdiose dull answers 
are the best justification of the biting severity of the 
castigation. But to-day these critics are forgotten, 
and wit that needs a commentary cannot long hold a 
place in popular favor. The most important result 
of the " Xenien " was to bring Goethe and Schiller 
before the world as allied champions of a common 
cause. 

But while these epigrams were still in the making 
the spring of 1796 had ripened a far greater plan in 
Schiller's reawakened mind. It is difficult to trace 
the progress of this overmastering idea, but he 
now determined to give the rest of his life to the 
drama, in which he had done nothing since he had 
come to Weimar nearly ten years before. But what 
a difference these years had wrought in aesthetic 
clearness and mental ripeness ! Xo one could per- 
ceive this more fully than he. " I advance to this 
new life with great pleasure and much confidence," 
he writes to Korner. " Of my former manner there 
is little that will help me, but I think I am far 
enough on with the new to make the venture. This 
much I know, that I am in the right way, and if I 
do not come up to my own demands I shall still do 



SCHILLER'S EARLY YEARS. 



255 



more than I have ever yet done in this line." Again 
he makes this most significant confession : " It is as- 
tonishing how much of the realistic mere advancing 
years bring with them, and how much of it constant 
intercourse with Goethe and the study of the ancients 
have by degrees developed in me." The spirit of 
Goethe inspiring a great idealist is now to give us 
the classic Schiller. 



256 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 

The newly awakened dramatic activity of Schiller 
naturally turned first to a subject with which he had 
been long familiar, and in which the tragic element 
had from the first attracted him. In his study of the 
Thirty Years' War it was clearly around the char- 
acter of Wallenstein that his interest had centred, and 
when later he visited Carlsbad he had not neglected 
to make a pilgrimage to the scene of that prince's 
murder at Eger. This, then, should be the subject of 
his first mature tragedy. But he must accustom his 
mind to work once more on the broad lines of dra- 
matic composition. The materials ordered themselves 
slowly, and it was not till 1798 that he settled down 
to continuous work on his masterpiece, — the trilogy 
of Wallenstein. 

Yet 1797 had been far from unproductive. He 
had shaken off at last the trammels of metaphysical 
theory and had returned to life, tempering his ideal- 
izing with a good measure of Goethe's healthy realism. 
He himself bears eloquent witness to the change that 
had been wrought in him. " I cannot express to you," 
he writes to his new friend, " how painful it is to me 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



257 



to glance from a production of this kind (' Wilhelm 
Meister' is meant) into the philosophical sphere. 
There all is so cheerful, so living, so harmoniously 
solved, so humanly true; here all is so severe, so 
rigid and abstract, so utterly unnatural ; for while all 
nature is synthesis, all philosophy is antithesis. The 
poet is the only true man, and the philosopher com- 
pared with him is but a caricature." 

Especially does this greater realism appear in the 
ballads of that year, " Der Taucher," " Die Kraniche 
von Ibykus," " Der Handschuh," " Der King von 
Polykrates," "Kitter Toggenburg," and "Der Gang 
nach dem Eisenhammer." 1 The precepts that the 
" Xenien " had tried to convey by the barbed arrows 
of satiric wit, these ballads taught by the gentler 
lessons of example. In "Der Taucher" is one of 
the most remarkable instances of the power of poetic 
imagination. The nearest approach to a whirlpool 
that Schiller had ever seen was a mill-race by the 
Saale, but he has given here a picture of one that is 
classic in the literatures of the world. These ballads, 
as a whole, are good in proportion as they approxi- 
mate the depth and intensity of passion that make 
Goethe supreme in this field. Schiller's best work 
has in it invariably an essential element of Goethe, 
so that we feel that it could not be as it is without 
him. 

It was in this year, also, that Schiller began " Das 
Lied von der Glocke," perhaps the most prized of his 

1 Many of Goethe's best ballads belong to this year, also; e. g., 
" Die Braut von Corinth," " Der Zauberlehrling," " Der Sanger." 

17 



258 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



lyrics in Germany, and certainly the best known 
abroad. The next year brought " Die Burgschaft " 
and " Der Kampf mit dem Drachen." It is througli 
the ballads of these two years that the German school- 
boy makes his acquaintance with Schiller, and so 
most of them have become familiar as household 
words in Germany even to those whose literary 
studies do not carry them to the higher walks of the 
drama. 

In May, 1797, Schiller had finished, though not in 
its present form, his Prologue to the play he meant 
to write on the subject of Wallenstein. Immediately 
he read it to Goethe, and in a week's visit to Weimar 
he gained new energy for the greater task. What 
this visit meant for the " Wallenstein " we see from 
a letter to his host written soon after : " The noblest 
and most fruitful way that I can use our mutual 
communications and make them mine is to apply 
them immediately to the work I have in hand and 
turn them to immediate profit ; . . . and so I hope 
that my " Wallenstein " and anything I may write 
hereafter will exhibit and preserve concretely the 
whole range of what has passed into my nature from 
our intercourse." 

In November, 1797, he determined to recast what 
he had written and put it in verse, and by New- 
Year, 1798, he had finished two acts, and could write 
to Goethe that he knew he had surpassed anything 
he had yet done, and this, he modestly but justly 
adds, "is the fruit of our intercourse." But now 
constant ill-health began to interrupt his work, and 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



259 



filled him with the greater discouragement as he saw 
the materials growing on his hands beyond possible 
compression into what could be acted on a single 
night. It was in this spirit that in June he wrote 
to Korner: " One ought to be careful how one ever 
undertakes such a complex, endless, and thankless 
task as my ' Wallenstein.' . . . The labor robs me 
of all the comfort of my life, ... for I am haunted 
with the thought of getting done at a fixed time." 
Yet it was not until September that the final division 
into two plays, with an extended prelude, was decided 
on, again during a visit to Goethe at Weimar. Thus 
the introductory " Wallenstein's Camp " became an 
independent piece whose realistic character was pecu- 
liarly sympathetic to Goethe, and he urged Schiller 
that he should bend all his energies to complete it 
for the opening of the Weimar theatre, which had 
just been rebuilt. And here it was in fact acted, 
October 11, 1798. 

The reception given to this piece of dramatic 
realism was most encouraging from every point of 
view. The romanticists might sneer that he had 
out-Goethe'd " Gotz; " but they felt that they were 
directly and dangerously attacked, for the play was 
most enthusiastically received where its full import 
was best understood. And now Goethe began to 
urge with more earnestness than before that the 
" Piccolomini," the second part of the dramatic trilogy, 
should be brought to a close. For this he assisted 
Schiller's dramatic work at every step with advice 
and encouragement, and at last, on Christmas Eve, 



260 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



1798, Schiller could write to Goethe that this part 
was completed. " Scarce another for thirty miles 
around has spent such a Christmas Eve," he said ; 
" I was so harassed and tormented with the fear of 
not getting done." But Goethe thought the effort by 
which he had shaken the piece from his mind a gain 
to him and to it. Schiller was inclined during all 
his best years to be overcautious, and certainly 
would have done less had it not been for the stimulus 
of his friend, who knew the value of Grimm's saying, 
that in literature one must have the courage of par- 
tial failure or one will never win a complete success. 
It was, therefore, of peculiar importance to "Wal- 
lenstein " that in January, 1799, Schiller came to 
Weimar, where he passed the greater part of five 
weeks in the older poet's society. On the 30th of 
that month " Piccolomini " w T as first produced, to the 
entire satisfaction of author and manager, while the 
public seemed awed by the consciousness of a loftier 
spirit than had yet crossed the German stage. 

On this visit Schiller came into closer personal 
contact with Duke Karl August, who still hesitated, 
however, to summon him to the court. In February 
Goethe returned to Jena with him, and for three 
weeks in daily conversations stimulated him to con- 
tinue in the way he had so auspiciously begun by 
completing " Wallenstein's Death," — the final drama 
of the trilogy. And he was so successful in rousing 
Schiller's activity that before the end of March the 
play could be given to the theatre ; and on April 15, 
17, and 20, 1799, days memorable in the annals of 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



261 



the German drama, the whole great work was rendered 
for the first time. 

As a stage-play, " Wallenstein " has never been 
equalled in Germany, and the well-nigh universal 
applause drowned the carping of such envious roman- 
ticists as Caroline Schlegel and the petty malice of 
Herder. At times the whole audience was in tears, 
and even the actors with difficulty restrained their 
emotions. From this moment it was not possible for 
Schiller to doubt that the drama was his supreme 
vocation. He had not left Weimar before he had 
determined to present on the stage the tragic end of 
Mary Queen of Scots. 

In the trilogy of " Wallenstein," the first part, " The 
Camp," shows the spectator the strange environment 
in which the double play that follows is to take place, 
and by which alone it and its protagonist, " Wallen- 
stein," are to be understood and judged. So the Pro- 
logue forms an essential part of the whole, without 
which the rest lacks artistic unity, — a fact often for- 
gotten, especially by foreign readers. It does, indeed, 
present some difficulties; but he who has not mas- 
tered them will never master " Wallenstein." In a 
series of brilliant scenes the social anarchy of Ger- 
many is brought vividly before the spectator, — an 
anarchy the result of fifteen years of internecine 
strife, to be followed by as many more of smouldering 
ruin. The spectator is thus made to see that it is 
not Wallenstein's fate alone, but the fate of German 
nationality, that is at stake. On the one hand the 
military genius and his devotees, with all the vices 



262 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



and the virtues, too, of a mercenary soldiery ; on the 
other hand, the nation, almost expiring under burdens 
laid on them wantonly and for no cause that stirred 
the national heart. Indeed, so wholly is Wallen- 
stein's army divorced from the people that children 
have been born and grown into schoolboys in his 
camp, a generation that has never known any other 
social condition than that of legalized plunder. The 
army has its preachers, also, and in fact its own the- 
ology. The credulous ruffians gather open-mouthed 
about a capuchin, who gives them a sermon in the 
style of Abraham a Sancta- Clara's " Merk's Wien," in 
strange doggerel spiced with bits of Latin, that is a 
perfect marvel of rough and rollicking humor. Sutler- 
women, recruits, veterans, peasants, Croats, all con- 
tribute to the many-colored picture. The whole 
treatment is by types ; the stupid, the unscrupulous, 
the gay youngster, the professional trooper, are all 
characterized in their relations to Wallen stein, to the 
civilians and to the nation, and in their conception of 
their own function. 1 And behind it all, though 
neither Wallenstein nor the emperor appear, there 
looms up the inevitable conflict between the old 
order of society represented by the imperial court 
and this new order that the genius of Wallenstein 
has imposed on the old as a condition of its existence. 
The bright panorama, in spite of the superb soldier 
song with which it closes, leaves us with an anxious 
foreboding of impending catastrophe, that is, in the 
true tragic mood. 

1 Compare Sclierer, Deutsche Litteraturgesckichte, 594 (1st 
edition). 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



263 



The second part, "Die Piccolomini," introduces 
the spectator into a higher political sphere. The 
date is 1634. The Piccolomini, father and son, 
Octavio and Max, are officers in Wallenstein's army, 
and the former, while enjoying the general's complete 
confidence, has been chosen secretly by the court to 
be his successor when it shall seem possible to de- 
pose him with safety; but of this Max is ignorant. 
Wallenstein, though he knows the ill-will of the 
court, supposes they will not dare to dispense with 
him. He, however, thinks he can dispense with 
them, and is already negotiating with the Swedes, 
enemies of the empire, but, as Wallenstein persuades 
himself, better fitted to be the masters. The con- 
flict of genius and duty in Wallenstein will be re- 
flected also in each of his generals, who have to decide 
between loyalty to the emperor and fidelity to their 
chief. And in this conflict each will decide accord- 
ing to his nature. The typical method is again em- 
ployed, but here a secondary plot comes in to give to 
one of Wallenstein's subordinates a pre-eminent place, 
and so to give this play its name. 

The central figure of "Die Piccolomini" is Max. 
He is attached to the emperor by loyalty, to his 
father by filial duty, to Wallenstein by admiration, 
and to Wallenstein's daughter, Thekla, by love. The 
conflict of these feelings forms the subject of the 
play, which breaks off abruptly in tragic suspense. 
Octavio furnishes his son with proof of Wallenstein's 
intended desertion of the imperial cause, and the 
lover, with a soldier's bluntness, rushes away to de- 



264 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



mand an explanation from the lips of his idolized 
general. Evidently there is here no complete catas- 
trophe. Take the play alone, and one might almost 
say of it, as Jean Paul Eichter did : " It is excellent 
— rather tedious — and false. Beautiful language, 
strong poetic passages, some good scenes — no char- 
acter, no stream of action, and no conclusion." 
Eichter, as we know, was not very kindly disposed 
toward Schiller, his affiliations were rather with the 
Eomanticists ; but there is justification for nearly all 
his strictures, and " Die Piccolomini " would probably 
never have achieved success as an independent pro- 
duction. It needed the concluding drama, "Wallen- 
steins Tod," to give it artistic completeness. For 
this last play, as Goethe said, " sprang from the two 
preceding like the flower from its sepal." But 
whether " Wallensteins Tod " needed " Die Picco- 
lomini," or rather whether without serious loss it 
could not have been so modified as not to need it, is 
a question that has been much discussed, with the 
balance inclining perhaps in favor of an affirmative 
decision. But we have to do here with what is, not 
with what might have been, and it is not very safe 
for critics to put asunder what Goethe and Schiller 
joined after long and careful deliberation. 

This last play has, beside its main plot culminat- 
ing in the death of Wallenstein, a second and subor- 
dinate one, which deals with the loves of Max and 
Wallenstein's daughter, Thekla. Thus the unity of 
action is violated, and the tragedy loses somewhat of 
its sombre sternness. But he would indeed be a 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



265 



heartless critic whom the beauty of this subordinate 
plot did not blind to a fault so graceful as to be itself 
a virtue; for the loves of the gallant officer and the 
noble but artless girl, ardent and simple, yet clear- 
sighted and honest to her highest self, have lost none 
of their fascination for the young men and maidens 
of Germany to-day. All the world loves a lover and 
all the world love Max and Thekla ; even Schiller 
himself, who was sternly objective to his other char- 
acters, fell in love with these gentle creations of his 
fancy. 

Wallenstein's daughter is a delicate flower, blooming 
its brief summer on an Alpine crag around which the 
storm clouds are gathering. In " Die Piccolomini " 
(iii. 7) she sings a wonderful little song that seems to 
breathe foreboding of her corning fate. 1 Her love is 
used by unscrupulous intriguers to bind Max to the 
cause of her father. But Wallenstein will not, per- 
haps already he cannot, return to his allegiance. 
What is left for Max ? Of himself he might waver, 
but Thekla, with a woman's more idealized sense of 

1 Tt is thus translated by Charles Lamb (cited by Coleridge, 
The Piccolomini [ii. 6]) : — 

"The clouds are blackening, the storms threatening, 
The cavern doth mutter, the greenwood moan, 
Billows are breaking, the damsel's heart aching, 
Thus in the dark night she singeth alone, 
Her eye upward roving : 
' The world is empty, the heart is dead surely, 

In this world plainly all seemeth amiss ; 
To thy heaven, Holy One, take home thy little one, 
I have partaken of all earthly bliss, 
Both living and loving.' " 



266 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



duty and readiness of sacrifice, sees that the tragic 
end is the only noble one. With his devoted soldiers 
Max falls, resisting the advance of the Swedes, and 
Wallenstein's world-embracing plans are dashed in 
pieces on the simple uprightness of his daughter. 

In Max and Thekla, as in Goethe's Iphigenie, we 
are dealing, not with characters, but with types. 
Wallenstein is a more complex creation. One may 
often be in doubt whether to sympathize with, to 
condone, or to condemn his high-minded plans for 
the delivery of Germany from religious strife by a 
broader toleration than could be hoped from the im- 
perial court. Even he himself is not sure of himself. 
Like Macbeth, he hesitates, and is lost where a less 
noble mind might have attained its lower ambition. 
But in blackest disaster he is himself again. How 
boldly his words ring out : " It must be night that 
Friedland's star may shine ! " And when at last he 
falls a victim to base revenge and hired assassins, we 
feel a perplexity and a sympathetic fear of fate, 
carrying out the mood of the Prologue in the spirit 
of true tragedy, according to the Greek conception, 
which Schiller was certainly following here, though 
he had once condemned it, before he had learned to 
know Goethe and the power of classic realism. It 
is this realism that he has sought to combine with 
the ideal, as it appears in Max and Thekla, to a 
completer reflection of life than either could offer 
alone. 

The minor characters of the drama are vividly 
drawn, but tend always to the typical. Octavio, the 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



267 



cool, calculating Italian, friend of Wallenstein's youth, 
and instrument of his fall, whose success brings with 
it its own nemesis in the death of his only son, con- 
trasts with the unscrupulously ambitious Tertzky. 
The reckless Illo, the sturdy and loyal Tiefenbach, 
and the Croat Isolani, who follows war as a trade for 
the revenue it promises and the plunder it offers, the 
cautious Scot Gordon, and Buttler, with his self- 
deceiving Irish impetuosity, have each a well-marked 
and sustained individuality. The women are some- 
what less distinctly drawn. Wallenstein's wife is 
weak and indefinite ; Countess Tertzky is a rather un- 
successful Lady Macbeth. But the interest here was 
so centred on Thekla that it might have been an 
artistic mistake to distract attention from so beautiful 
an ideal of simple truth and loving womanhood. 

Almost the whole of May, 1799, was passed by 
Goethe with Schiller, in Jena, and partly as the 
result of this the plan of "Maria Stuart" was so 
fully elaborated in June that composition on it 
could be begun. But Schiller had now won greater 
confidence ; he desired no essential change in the 
dramatic methods of " Wallenstein," and so the piece 
progressed in its formative stage far more rapidly 
than " Wallenstein " had done. Already, in Sep- 
tember, he had reached the famous scene between 
Mary and her captor, Elizabeth, in the third act ; but 
here he paused a while and took up the " Song of the 
Bell," which was finished during the latter part of 
that month, again while Goethe was with him in 
Jena. But immediately after, in October, he resumed 



268 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



the drama again ; for there are now few pauses in 
the perennial flow which intercourse with Goethe 
aroused in his mind; and this association was made 
unbroken by his removal, in December (1799), to 
Weimar. 

" The Song of the Bell " is Schiller's most popular 
lyric, nor can the critic blame the general voice. Its 
avowed imitations, Longfellow's " Building of the 
Ship" and " Forging of the Anchor," will best describe 
its general structure to English readers. The various 
processes of casting a bell until at length it is placed 
in its belfry, " to call the living, mourn the dead, and 
break the lightnings," 1 are brought before the reader 
with all the charm of poetic genius, and the account 
of each stage in the casting is followed by reflections 
on the tasks and scenes of daily life which it may be 
thought to symbolize or typify. Thus the whole be- 
comes a reflection of popular aspirations and activi- 
ties, and so was well suited to be a universal favorite 
among the multitudes whose simple life it portrayed, 
and that just because it never went beyond the narrow 
philistine horizon of town-hall and fireside, while 
within these limitations all was treated with consum- 
mate clearness and art. 

In Weimar, Schiller might find, as he said, " very 
little intellect in circulation ; " but he was close to 
Goethe and to the theatre, and like his friend, whose 
" soul was like a star and dwelt apart," he was far 

1 This was the motto of a bell at Schaffhausen, and Schiller took 
it for the motto of his poem: " Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura 
frango," — the last an allusion to an old and general superstition. 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



269 



above the petty scandals of that little Residenz. Be- 
sides, it was a relief to escape from the Kantians of 
Jena, who, as Schiller told Goethe, " were only fit to 
play cards with." The climate of Weimar, too, was 
some alleviation to him, though he suffered acutely 
at intervals from this time until his death. Best of 
all, however, he was able to give his whole strength 
to literary composition, undisturbed by professorial 
or editorial cares, and in most delightful home sur- 
roundings ; while, socially, he was on at least friendly 
relations with all but the jealous Herder. 

Under these auspicious conditions " Maria Stuart " 
grew apace, so that it could be put on the stage in 
June, 1800. " At last," he writes to Korner, " I begin 
to be master of dramatic composition and to compre- 
hend my craft." This is entirely true if we are to 
understand by his words a mastery of blank verse, or a 
mastery of the art of telling the dramatic story as he had 
conceived it ; but if mastery of dramatic conception is 
meant, he may seem a little sanguine. Nowhere had 
Schiller yet shown such power of theatrical pomp, 
nowmere had he arranged his materials so artistically, 
indicating clearly in the first act all the means of 
which he intended to avail himself to carry the action 
in swift and unbroken course, through the gathering 
clouds of the second and third, to the crisis in the 
fourth, and the catastrophe with its nemesis in the 
fifth. But on the other hand, the conception leaves 
much to be desired, and there was more division of 
sentiment regarding it in the literary public than had 
been shown toward " Wallenstein." It was undeni- 



270 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

able that the story was extremely well told. Madame 
de Stael thought it the best conceived and most pa- 
thetic of German tragedies, but critics were quick to 
see that he had not made use of some of the highest 
tragic elements that history might have afforded him. 
At a time when Catholic and mediaeval Europe was 
struggling with vain heroism against the rising tide 
of free thought and national development, Mary and 
Elizabeth could easily have been made types of these 
opposing tendencies, and so the drama might have 
won the higher interest that attaches to " Wallen- 
stein." But Schiller chose, as it seems with delib- 
erate intention, to rely almost wholly on the personal 
interest that the beautiful captive queen might rouse, 
and it is the pathos of her fate, more than its tragic 
necessity, that impresses the spectator. 

This appears most clearly if it be considered what 
have always been the favorite scenes of the play. 
There are three that occur to every reader. In the first, 
Mary describes the joy she feels in the new liberty 
that allows her to walk in the park of her castle- 
prison. The scene is half operatic and lyric, and is 
highly pathetic in itself, but it is not necessary to the 
action. Then there is the climatic scene between 
Mary and Elizabeth, unhistorical of course, but a 
marvel of vigorous dialogue. Yet in its effect on the 
drama it is less commendable ; for the rage that it 
induces in the insulted Elizabeth influences her to 
permit the execution of Mary, and thus, by degrading 
her character, lowers the tragic dignity of the whole. 
And finally, among the most affecting passages in the 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



271 



play are Mary's farewells before her execution ; but 
these are as unnecessary to the catastrophe as is the 
anticlimax of the scenes that follow it at the court 
of Elizabeth. It is these passages, and the intrinsic 
fascination of the subject itself, that have given vital- 
ity to the tragedy as a whole, not in Germany alone, 
but in England also. 

Scherer has remarked that the characters in "Maria 
Stuart" are neither richly furnished nor exhaust- 
ively treated. Neither Mary nor Elizabeth have 
Wallenstein's tragic depth ; we do not feel that these 
are people to move the world, and shape the desti- 
nies of men. Roth are less grand than their historic 
prototypes ; perhaps because, had Schiller given them 
their place on the stage of the world, it would have 
been more difficult for him to preserve the pure ob- 
jectivity to which he now aspired. The minor char- 
acters are, in the main, types, as in " Wallenstein." 
The weak vacillation of Leicester is contrasted with 
the calculating, passionless statesmanship of Bur- 
leigh, and the passionate but chivalrous fanaticism 
of Mortimer. Here, too, Schiller is purely objective ; 
and it is perhaps noteworthy that, while in " Wal- 
lenstein," Max, the idealist, has the sympathy of the 
author, he shows none for the idealism of Mortimer, 
though no German poet has made more effective use 
of the Eoman ritual, that fired Mortimer's heart, 
than the Protestant Schiller in this drama. Still, 
taken as a whole, " Maria Stuart " is inferior to " Wal- 
lensteins Tod," while it marks an advance on it in 
metrical skill and narrative composition. 



272 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Schiller now, from time to time, replaced Goethe in 
the management of the Court Theatre, for acquaint- 
ance had gradually removed the duke's scruples. 
It was thus that, while writing " Maria Stuart," he 
had found occasion to translate and adapt Shaks- 
pere's " Macbeth " to the needs of the Weimar public, 
and the influence of this close contact with Shaks- 
pere was marked in his next work. For he was 
now revolving in his mind a dramatic subject so pecu- 
liar that he did not venture to discuss it with Goethe 
till it should have taken definite form. "A demon 
pursues me," he writes, " till I can see the two pieces 
I have next in my mind fairly written out." These 
were "Warbeck," which remained unexecuted, and 
" Die Jungfrau von Orleans," which holds a unique 
place in the history of the German stage. 

At first, it is clear that Schiller intended to treat 
the story of the holy Maid as he had done that of 
Mary or Wallenstein ; he would idealize history, but 
he would follow its main outlines and essential situ- 
ations. And so he set about a deliberate study of 
authorities, as the records of the Weimar library tes- 
tify. But the more he progressed in this work, the 
more the difficulties that it involved were revealed 
to him, and he abandoned in great measure his ear- 
lier plan, allowed his fancy freer scope, and gave to 
the play that resulted the significant sub-title " a ro- 
mantic tragedy," thus preparing his readers for what 
is to follow, and confessing at least a partial sym- 
pathy with the aims of the new Eomantic School 
which was then formulating its critical canons in 
Weimar and Berlin. 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



273 



The plan of this new play gave him much trouble, 
as appears from his correspondence, 1 but by the mid- 
dle of November he was well advanced in the second 
act, and on Christmas Eve, 1800, he writes to Goethe : 
"The historical part has been mastered . . . and 
made use of to the fullest extent possible. The mo- 
tives are all poetical, and for the most part naive." 
And a little later he writes to Korner : "My tragedy, 
though it progresses rather slowly, is gaining good 
form. The subject itself sustains my interest, and I 
am in it with my whole heart ; and besides, it flows 
more out of my heart than any of my previous pieces, 
where reason has to struggle with the subject." That 
is, he found opportunity here to give his idealizing 
fancy freer scope than his new aesthetics and classical 
studies had permitted in these later years. 

Toward the close of his work he grew quite enthu- 
siastic. " I expect much good from my last act," he 
writes on April 3 ; "it explains the first, and thus 
the serpent will bite into its own tail. As my hero- 
ine stands alone in it, and is deserted by the gods in 
her misfortune, she gives more distinct evidence of 
her independence and of the prophetic part she has 
to play. The close of the last act but one is very 
dramatic, and the thundering deus ex machina will 
not fail to produce its effect." Goethe was disposed 
to share Schiller's anticipations, and writes to him 
that the day of its completion " forms an epoch." 

The play — first acted in Leipsic, September 18, 

1 See the dates June 16, July 26, August 2, September 3, 
November 19, December 24, 1800. 

18 



274 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

1801 — was an unparalleled triumph for the poet. 
Silent, and with bared heads, the audience greeted 
the author at the theatre's exit. Parents lifted their 
children to see him. The critics of the press did not 
know what to say of so new a genre, and limited them- 
selves to general terms of admiration. But time 
has enabled us to judge more dispassionately both 
the drama and the enthusiasm it evoked. Its imme- 
diate popularity was in part due to the timeliness of 
the subject. Joan of Arc had liberated France from 
English invaders so wonderfully that God had seemed 
to aid with miracles her simple patriotism. Germany 
was now half subjected to Napoleon, and the national 
spirit found a consolation in the inspiring mediaeval 
story. But in part this popularity was due to what 
will probably now be reckoned a defect, — its roman- 
tic idealism. Tor in spite of its careful composition, 
in spite of its firm metrical structure, and of some 
truly Shaksperian passages and dramatic situations 
of great power, it was, in its medievalism, in its more 
frequent use of rhyme and occasional lyric strophes, 
a distinct concession to the romantic doctrines of the 
Schlegels. Further evidence of this tendency can be 
found in Schiller's proclamation, as stage manager, 
that he would " wage eternal war with all natu- 
ralism." This was said of the delivery of blank 
verse, but it shows that he could not yet see the 
relation of art and nature, — of the German and the 
classical spirit that, in their harmonious union, made 
the supreme strength of Goethe's genius. 

Unnatural idealization is the fundamental fault of 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



275 



the " Maid of Orleans." There is more of true tragedy 
in the story of Joan of Arc than in Schiller's arti- 
ficial heroine. He may have intended, as Scherer 
observes, " to embody the naive," but he does not 
always perceive the narrow bound that separates the 
childlike from the childish. "Schiller does not 
know how to express the charm of nature. On this 
rock the sentimental poet suffers shipwreck. De- 
clamatory lyric has to pass for the missing naiveteV' 1 
and so the supernatural, miraculous element is more 
disturbing here than in " Eaust." The realists of the 
play, Talbot and Thibaut, are caricatures. Joan's love 
for the English Lionel is a gratuitous humiliation of 
the single-minded purity of the historic Maid, and 
the arguments by which she brings Burgundy back 
to his French allegiance are so puerile as to justify 
a critic's remark that he may be touched by them, 
but we certainly are not. It is difficult, therefore, 
to understand how Goethe could find the " Maid of 
Orleans" "so complete, so good, so beautiful, that 
he knew nothing to compare with it." That it should 
be still a favorite with the great mass of German 
theatre-goers is due partly to the real merits of 
the individual scenes, partly to the humiliating fact 
that the theatre-going public is neither aesthetically 
trained nor critically cultured. 

In the autumn of 1801, Schiller visited his friends 
in Dresden, and in the gallery there discovered how 
much of beauty he had passed by unheeded, because 
uncomprehended, fourteen years before. So far had 
1 Scherer, 1. c. 602. 



276 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Goethe helped him to appreciation of art, and especi- 
ally of the antique. This found its clearest reflection 
in his next drama, " Die Braut von Messina," though 
many things interrupted his work on it, and the 
play was not completed till two years later, after the 
plan of " Wilhelm Tell " was already far advanced. 

Meantime Schiller had been ennobled, at the 
duke's initiative, and quite without any effort on the 
poet's part. No title could add to Schiller's distinc- 
tion, but his nobility conveyed some privileges which, 
in a small court like Weimar, would be socially con- 
venient, especially to his wife, who by her marriage 
had sacrificed those that she held by her birth. 
"You must have laughed," he writes to Humboldt, 
" when you heard of our rise in rank. It was an 
idea of the duke's, and, since it has happened, I am 
glad of it for Lolo's and the children's sake." 

" The Bride of Messina, or the Fraternal Enemies " 
had been in Schiller's mind, in its essential outlines, 
as early as 1788, but everything in the play, except 
those essential outlines, had been radically changed 
by the esthetic development of the poet during these 
fourteen years. Had it been written then, it would 
have been, like " Don Carlos," a stormy melodrama ; 
it is the most classic and most stately of all German 
tragedies. For its composition, Schiller sought delib- 
erately to infuse his mind as far as possible with 
classic literature. He read Stolberg's translations of 
iEschylus, for he had too little Greek to attempt the 
original. But his soul was already so attuned to 
classic ideals that even in this form their effect was 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



277 



remarkable. " Not for years," he writes, " have I 
been filled with so much awe as by these deeply 
poetic works." And with this inspiration, he pro- 
duced a tragedy that seemed to him worthy of its 
source. He says that it was at the initial performance 
of the " Bride of Messina " that he " received for the 
first time the impression of a true tragedy." And to 
this extent at least Schiller's feeling is justified : 
there is no modern play that produces in the cultured 
spectator a frame of mind so closely analogous to that 
evoked by the Greek tragedies occasionally acted at 
our universities. 

The " Bride of Messina " was as different in form 
from all that had preceded it as the " Maid of Or- 
leans " had been. Not merely that the scene was 
shifted from mediaeval France to mediaeval Italy, ~but 
that we find ourselves in a new moral atmosphere, 
while the form of composition is changed to closer 
conformity with classical method, not alone by the in- 
troduction of a chorus, or rather of two rival choruses, 
in imitation of Greek usage, but also by presupposing, 
as having taken place before the action of the tragedy 
begins, much of what goes to make up the tragic situ- 
ation, which in a modern drama would form part of 
the play itself. 

But here, as Madame de Stael justly observed, 
Schiller attained rather an imitation of the form than 
of the spirit of the classic drama ; for, while a Greek 
chorus speaks for the interested but not participating 
spectators, the choruses in the (t Bride of Messina " 
are made up of the contentious followers of the rival 



278 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



brothers ; and their occasional lyric outbursts are only 
interludes in the rather violent part given them in 
the action. And the same general criticism would 
apply also where knowledge is assumed of foregoing 
but essential parts in the tragic situation. It is a 
different thing to take as one's subject a detached 
episode in the story of Agamemnon, which all spec- 
tators know, and a similar one in the story of two 
fraternal enemies, in whose tragic fate those spectators 
have first to be interested. 

Schiller probably felt this, for the plot of the play, 
in its extreme simplicity, is hardly more than a situ- 
ation. Two brothers, Manuel and Caesar, have been 
bitter rivals from youth, but they unite in love for 
their mother, Isabella, by whom they have been 
reconciled. Here the play opens. A messenger tells 
Ca3sar that a certain fair Beatrice, for whom he had 
been impetuously searching, is discovered at last. 
He hastens away. Then Manuel tells the chorus 
how that very night the love of his heart had been 
brought to Messina. The spectator feels that this 
lady, too, is Beatrice, and soon learns that she is the 
sister of both Caesar and Manuel, of whom oracles 
had foretold that she should unite the brothers in 
love, but also be the ruin of her race. Therefore she 
was to have been put to death, but her mother had 
suffered her to be hidden in a convent, and, now that 
the brothers are reconciled, mindful only of the favor- 
able oracle, she brings her back to seal the bond of 
their union. Thus she is guilty of what Greek tra- 
gedians know as " hybris," in presuming to trifle with 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



279 



an oracle. And punishment follows hard on her pre- 
sumption. For her brother Manuel has seen her in her 
convent seclusion, loved her, and won her love ; and 
Caesar too has conceived a passion for her, — of which, 
however, both she and Manuel are ignorant. This is 
the whole plot, or rather, as has been said, the whole 
tragic situation. Caesar finds Manuel with Beatrice, 
and kills him. Isabella curses the unknown mur- 
derer, heedless of the warnings of the chorus ; and so, 
when all is discovered, Caesar can but kill himself. 
Thus the oracle is avenged. Ate has put down 
Hybris. 

Perhaps nowhere on the modern stage has the 
Greek conception of relentless avenging Nemesis, that 
pursues pride to utter destruction, been so well pre- 
sented. This awe of doom, which is peculiar to 
Greek tragedy and quite apart from what we feel 
when we listen to " Othello," or " Hamlet," or " Lear," 
is attained here, and in so far Schiller accomplished 
what he undertook. It was, moreover, altogether 
consistent with this purpose that he should have 
made no effort at the delicate portrayal of character. 
The Greeks, too, had dealt rather with types. Nor 
will the judicious critic hold it a valid objection that 
the sentiment of the play, its passionate, almost ro- 
mantic, love is distinctly modern ; for there is no 
aesthetic reason why the Greek form might not suit 
one plane of sentiment as well as another. The real 
trouble with the " Bride of Messina " is that the two 
planes of feeling are not held sufficiently distinct. 
With a varnish of Christianity the rival brothers are 



280 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

essentially pagan, though indeed, as Schiller himself 
observed, this was not wholly unnatural in Sicily, 
where, since the days of Frederic IT., Mohamme- 
danism had neutralized the active principles of Chris- 
tianity, so that much masked paganism survived both 
in popular superstitions and in popular ethics. 

In stateliness and dignity of diction, the " Bride of 
Messina " is perhaps unsurpassed in German, and. 
the true classical irony, "that mixture of jest and 
earnest which for many is more mysterious and darker 
than all mysteries," as Schlegel has said, the irony of 
fate, radically different from that " irony " that was 
then suffering such abuse at the hands of the roman- 
ticists, was represented here with greater strength 
than ever before or since in Germany. A single 
strophe from the final chorus may suggest to the 
classical student interesting lines of comparison be- 
tween the aesthetics and the ethics of Schiller and of 
Sophocles or iEschylus : — 

" Through the streets of the city, 
By misery followed, 
Misfortune strides, 
And lurking she creeps 
Round the houses of men. 
To-day upon this 
Portal she knocks, 
To-morrow on that. 
But none spares she wholly. 
Sooner or later, 
The dreaded, unwelcome 
Message of pain, 
She prints upon every 
Threshold where mortals dwell." 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



281 



But whatever its abstract merits, the "Bride of 
Messina " did not achieve so unqualified a success on 
the stage, nor yet in its printed form, as the " Maid 
of Orleans." The students of Jena did indeed give it 
an enthusiastic reception, but they were naturally 
almost the only spectators whom the fresh study of 
Greek models had put in a mood to comprehend its 
classic beauty. But while they cheered him vigor- 
ously at the close of the play, Karl August thought 
he had gone too far, and perhaps Goethe shared the 
feeling, for in Schiller's letters at this period there 
occurs a curious passage that suggests that the two 
were not then in perfect critical accord. " If Goethe," 
he writes, " had any faith left in the possibilities of 
something good being done, and any continuity in what 
he does do, many things might yet be realized here 
in Weimar, both in art generally and especially in 
the drama. At all events something might come up 
and this dreary state of blockade be broken. Alone 
I can do nothing. I feel often like looking about for 
some other seat and sphere of action. If there were 
a tolerable situation anywhere I would go." At the 
time this letter was written Goethe was engaged on 
his "Natiirliche Tochter." There are some indica- 
tions that he kept his plans more a secret than usual 
from his friend. This, and the ups and downs of 
Schiller's precarious health, may account for a pessi- 
mistic mood, though in his sober mind Schiller could 
not have expected a popular success for the " Bride 
of Messina." 

" Wilhelrn Tell " was already planned before the 



282 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



" Bride of Messina " was finished, but Schiller laid it 
aside for a time and occupied himself in preparing 
for the German stage Picard's " Encore des Me- 
nechmes " and " MeMiocre et Eampant," which ap- 
peared as " Der Nefi'e als Onkel " and " Der Parasit," 
and are still frequently acted in Germany. It was 
not till June (1803) that he at last concentrated his 
thoughts again on " Tell," and not till the end of 
August that he began to give the work its final 
form. 

Here, again, he chose a new country for his scene, 
a country whose old traditions accorded with the 
revolutionary politics of the new era to make it a 
fit site for a drama of national freedom. The idea of 
the subject came from Goethe, who had written to 
Schiller six years before that he thought " Tell would 
suit for an epic poem." Schiller had warmly com- 
mended the idea of his friend, just then fresh from 
the epic success of " Hermann und Dorothea." But 
the plan soon "lost' the charm of novelty," as Goethe 
said. Besides, he thought the material better suited 
for a drama, and "so better adapted to his friend than 
to himself. From 1802 the subject is recognized as 
Schiller's, who writes to Korner : " If the gods grant 
me strength to put into shape what I have in my head, 
it will be a thing of power to shake the theatres of 
Germany." 

Several things conspired to check his progress. 
Schiller had never seen Switzerland. He felt it 
necessary to make many preliminary studies that he 
might catch the local color, which was more necessary 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



283 



in this national drama than in the romantic " Maid 
of Orleans/' or in the classic " Bride of Messina." 
Then, too, at this time he was much occupied with 
Madame de Stael, whom Goethe had rather put off 
on him ; for having once invited her to dinner and 
used all his courtier's tact to avoid her insatiable 
inquisitiveness, that shrewd privy counsellor had 
suddenly discovered that his health did not permit 
him to receive strangers. 

Madame de Stael, who had been for some time in 
Germany, studying foreign manners under the guid- 
ance of Wilhelm Schlegel, was a woman of great 
talent, and was now gathering material for her 
" L' Allemagne," a book in which she strove to con- 
vince France that it needed a cosmopolitan spirit. 
Schiller could not fail to esteem her genius, though 
he did not sympathize with her philosophy, for he 
said that, unlike the popular metaphysicians of Jena, 
Madame de Stael " allowed nothing hard or unfathom- 
able. What she could not light with her torch did 
not exist for her. Of ideal philosophy she had a 
natural horror, for she thought it led to mysticism 
and superstition, and these choked her like nitrogen." 
He found her indeed witty and keen, with an extraor- 
dinary flow of language, but without much ideality 
or poetry, and quite without what the Germans prized 
as feminine reserve. Her society seemed to oppress 
him, and he writes to Goethe of the difficulty he finds 
in composing " in the present suffocating air." But 
as he had "Tell" warmly at heart, he avoided her 
as far as possible until he had finished the drama, in 



284 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



February, 1804. When once she had left Weimar 
he says lie " felt as though he had recovered from a 
severe illness." 

In writing "Tell" Schiller was aided by Goethe's 
reminiscences, and by those of his wife, by maps and 
books which Cotta supplied, and, as he says, especially 
by Shakspere's " Julius Caesar," which " buoyed up 
his own little craft, and put him in a most productive 
frame of mind." The legendary materials were bor- 
rowed freely from the Swiss chronicler, Tschudi, who 
assigns to the story a local habitation and the date 
1307-8. But the tale belongs to the common folk- 
lore of nations. The hat on the pole to which the 
people are to bow as a sign of subjection, the refusal 
of the free mountaineer, the cruel jest by which he 
is forced to earn the promise of pardon by shooting 
the apple from the head of his son, the faithlessness 
of the governor, his assassination, and the liberation 
of the cantons from foreign bondage, is a tale familiar 
to every schoolboy. But Schiller's treatment of it is 
noteworthy, first of all, because this is the first of his 
dramas where realistic activity is crowned with the 
success that normally attends it. In thus abandon- 
ing a tragic conclusion Schiller made a material step 
toward the position of Goethe. Gessler is indeed 
killed, but his part is unsympathetic and secondary, 
so that his death is not felt as tragic by the spectator. 
Then, secondly, in construction " Tell" marks an en- 
tire departure from the classic standard of the " Bride 
of Messina." The change is not merely formal, as by 
giving up the chorus, but essential, for it abandons 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



285 



the fundamental conception of Hybris and Ate. The 
resistless power of destiny and fate no longer fills the 
foreground. Bather do we find a cheerful confidence 
in the power of sturdy manliness over destiny, a con- 
fidence that Schiller had not expressed since " Don 
Carlos," and which marks an ethical change of great 
significance in the author's conception of life. 

And so we come to the third point. " Tell " is 
sharply differentiated from all the plays of the 
Weimar epoch. Its differentiation from the earlier 
dramas is as sharp, but yet of another character. The 
confidence in mankind and its destiny shown in 
" Fiesco " and the " Bobbers " was a rebellious, an- 
archical confidence, born of wild notions of equality, 
fraternity, and a millennium to be won by destruction 
of the existing social order. But in " Tell," age and 
the French revolution have ripened his experience, 
the visionary, idealistic reformer has become a prac- 
tical realist, taking society and mankind as he finds 
them. So the insurgents of the Biitli in " Tell " 
know what they want, they have definite grievances 
and definite aims, they seek no " rights of man," but 
they have a healthy determination to regain their 
chartered rights. Tell himself stands apart from 
them. He is a type of natural independence. He 
will not bind himself to act with others ; but when 
he feels the measure of wrongs is full he kills the 
tyrant dispassionately, almost regretfully. 

So " Tell " stands apart and marks an advancing 
serenity that well becomes a great poet's last work. 
And where we can compare it, as like to like, with 



286 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



what has preceded we feel, too, that there is growth, 
that Schiller has not yet attained the crowning point 
of his genius. Never had lie caught so perfectly the 
spirit of his scene, the genius loci, as here. The 
mountain pastures, with their tinkling herds, the clear 
lakes, lashed at times to sudden fury by blasts from 
icy gorges, the snowy peaks, the far-off glaciers, the 
gloomy piues, the wild ravines with their rushing 
torrents, give the play a scenic individuality. One 
needs not to have seen Switzerland to feel that here 
is something real, though unknown, while all who 
have lived in these scenes pay their tribute to the 
truthfulness of the poet's imagination. And yet 
the Swabian hills were the only mountains that he 
knew. 

" ' Tell ' is more effective on the stage," so Schiller 
wrote, " than any of my other pieces, and the per- 
formance gave me great pleasure. I feel that I am 
gradually mastering the secret of dramatic art." But 
the play had its weak points. It conceded too much 
to popular and literary prejudice. It would be artis- 
tically better for the omission of the generous, but 
rather romantic love of Bertha and Eudenz. The kill- 
ing of Gessler, too, is made less important to the libera- 
tion of the people than the imprisonment of Bertha, 
and might almost seem to have been unnecessary, 
while it was clearly justifiable ; so that the spectator 
is needlessly rasped by the closing defence of an act 
that needs none. No one was likely to take Tell's 
deed as an indirect argument for regicide, and one 
resents the suggestion of such a possibility by the 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



287 



introduction of John of Austria, the murderer of the 
emperor, as a contrasted figure to the executioner of 
Gessler. Indeed, Tell's horror at John's act is irri- 
tating to-day, and can hardly have been necessary in . 
1804, though of course at that time an appeal to 
patriotic revolt against foreign tyranny had a direct 
application to Germany, then under the heavy yoke 
of Napoleon and on the eve of her deepest humilia- 
tion. Thus " Tell " struck a patriotic chord, whose 
vibration silenced every criticism and explains an 
enthusiasm that thrilled all Germany. No German 
drama before or since has ever produced so deep or 
so lasting an impression. 

Perhaps it was this patriotic spirit in "Tell" that 
now brought Schiller a serious invitation to become 
a pensioner of- the court of Berlin, which he visited 
with his family while the drama was in the hey-day 
of its first success. They were cordially received by 
Frederic William and the gentle Luise, and Lotte 
was charmed with the condescension that admitted 
her children to the high honor of playing with the 
little prince who was to become the first German 
emperor. But they had now no wish to change their 
home. Still, the invitation brought him a welcome 
increase of salary at Weimar, though but little time 
was left him to enjoy it. For on his return he was 
prostrated by illness, and was never strong again. 
He lingered, however, for many months, and his long 
agony was not ended till May of the next year. 

During this last period Schiller did little, except to 
sketch and partly elaborate a drama of Polish and 



288 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Eussian life, " Demetrius," which shows, even in its 
unfinished condition, that his power of tragic concep- 
tion and execution was unabated, perhaps was at its 
very highest, when he was taken in his prime (May 
9, 1805). It is a curious coincidence that, as with 
his fellow-poet, Goethe, his last conscious wish should 
have been for " more light." 

In his " Epilogue to the Song of the Bell," Goethe 
gives us a key to the right understanding of Schiller's 
place in literature, when he makes it his essential 
nature to rise above the commonplace by which the 
mass of mankind is fettered. 1 Elsewhere he says 
that though Schiller " had the fortune to pass for a 
special friend of the people, he was more of an aris- 
tocrat than I." He lived largely in the realm of 
ideals. The common things of life; the noise of 
children, the visits of strangers, irritated him. He 
was never, like Goethe, a man of the world, on whom 
social duties sat easily. There was a certain char- 
acteristic artificiality in his daily life and methods 
of work. He liked close rooms, he found the smell 
of decaying apples stimulating, and a rosy light from 
red curtains helpful in composition. He worked 
much at night and under the stimulus of coffee, while 
Goethe preferred the morning hours, and wrote by 
preference in the open air. Schiller's long invalidism 
may excuse some eccentricity in these regards, — 
the more as his family life seems to have been most 

1 Und hinter ihm, in wesenlosem Seheine, 
Lag was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine. 

(Stanza i, last couplet.) 



SCHILLER ON THE HEIGHT. 



289 



happy and unclouded, and full of hopeful cheerful- 
ness, while his literary life was guided always by 
unselfish faith in the power of truth and beauty to 
win its way. 

In early life Schiller had been a social iconoclast. 
In his prime his influence was rather fructifying, re- 
fining, emancipating, — in language, in art, and in 
social and political life. The effect of his work on 
the German language has been lasting. His influ- 
ence on literary taste and production ceased very 
largely with his generation. He was not, like Goethe, 
a power for the whole coming century, with the roots 
of his creative genius so deep in the immutable nature 
of man as to be " not of an age, but for all time." 
His idealism is more and more difficult of compre- 
hension to the realistic spirit of our modern life which 
gains an ever firmer hold on the work of Goethe. 
The easy flow of his lyrics rouses a cold admiration. 
They lack Goethe's winning naivete' and the flash- 
ing keenness of Heine. At times there seems to 
have been danger that Schiller would become a poet 
of the school room. But to make him that alone 
would do grievous injustice to the battle he fought, 
and the victory he contributed in no small measure 
to win, for those ideals of truth and beauty to which 
he dedicated his life. And, though our credence in 
these should be outworn, the fruit of his inspiring 
friendship in the rich aftermath of Goethe's produc- 
tivity should secure him a grateful and enduring 
memory. 



19 



290 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



CHAPTER IX. 

RICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 

Jean Paul Friedrich Richter was bom in 1763, 
and was thus four years younger than Schiller, whom, 
under more favorable circumstances, he might have 
rivalled in influence, as he certainly did in originality 
of genius. But destiny placed him apart, and gave 
him so eccentric a development that what was grand 
in him seemed sometimes grotesque, and this could 
not but limit his power for good on the German 
people and their literature. 

Richter was the son of a poor pastor in the moun- 
tain district of the Fichtelgebirge, and his youthful 
environment tended to make him solitary, puritanic, 
and pedantic. In dire poverty and with despe- 
rate enthusiasm, he studied first at Hof, then in 
Leipzig, whence he was obliged to flee to escape his 
creditors. Unfortunately, he could not shake off as 
easily the pernicious spiritualism of Fichte's philos- 
ophy that lie had learned there. It is to this meta- 
physical bias that we may justly trace his contempt 
of form and rule, his strangely nebulous religious 
faith, his somewhat peculiar notions of love, and the 
liberality with which he shared his heart among 



RICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 291 

his many female admirers in the hey-day of his 
fame. 

While in Leipzig, Eichter wrote an essay on " The 
Eeligions of the World." Here the young pastor's 
son upholds the genial theory that, as each race had 
developed the religion best suited to it, so the Ger- 
mans were then gradually developing Christianity to 
the higher plane of Natural Eeligion. At the close, 
he prophesies that " the glorious dawn that is rising 
over our religious teaching announces a yet more 
glorious day, and is but a weak image of the sun that 
will shine for our descendants." 

Another literary work of this student period, his 
Satires, were too grim to be popular. They brought 
him nothing in money, nor immediately in fame. 
Their fierce spirit suggests Quevedo or Swift. A few 
sentences may suffice to indicate their embittered 
character. An aristocrat, he says, " reflects the fame 
of his ancestors as a mud-puddle does the sun." The 
theologian " can very seldom serve his neighbor 
because he must always serve G-od. He is so holy 
that he has no need to be virtuous [a hit at Luther's 
theory of good works] ; and hence he falls more rarely 
into the splendid than into the sordid vices of the 
heathen." " Those who are repairing the road to 
heaven have the least time to travel on it." " He 
who carries the lantern stumbles more readily than 
he who follows." " The Catholics have fasting diet, 
the Protestants fasting sermons. These hallow their 
bellies by emptiness, those their brains." Other pas- 
sages, and the strongest are among them, will hardly 



292 MODEEN GEEMAN LITEEATUEE. 



bear citation. It is right to remember, however, that 
he is writing in and of the decade that preceded the 
French Revolution, and of a class whose presump- 
tion Lessing had been obliged to scourge into silence 
only a few years before. But he hits on all sides ; 
telling us, for instance, how " Jews despise certain 
animals as much as they imitate them." 

Later on, when preparing a new edition of these 
Satires, he said : " The author at that time enjoyed 
the most beautiful things of life, — autumn, summer, 
spring, with their landscapes in earth and sky, — 
but he had nothing to eat or put on." This may 
account for their bitterness. But the worst was soon 
over for him : he was made a teacher at Schwarzen- 
bach; and this bit of sunshine, joined with the 
society of several bright young ladies from the neigh- 
boring Hof, — his " erotic academy," he called them, 
— was reflected immediately in the healthier humor 
of that delicious pedagogical idyl, "The life of the 
Happy Little Schoolmaster, Maria Wuz" (1790), the 
first thoroughly characteristic product of his pen. 
That it lacked all grace of form or style was less felt 
at that time, while the pranks of the " Storm and 
Stress" were still fresh in men's minds, than it 
would have been after Goethe had revived a classical 
taste. On the other hand, it was clear that the 
writer had genius and keen wit, and the book won 
its way to immediate and great popularity. " He 
who has written ' Wuz ' is immortal," the critic 
Moritz wrote to him (1792); and indeed we find 
here the promise of Richter's best work in aesthetics 



R1CHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 293 

and pedagogy, and a democratic spirit more genuine 
than Kousseau's. 

He was thus led to a bolder effort, " The Invisible 
Lodge" (1793), a fanciful tale of an idealized Free- 
Masonry, betraying more than any other of his works 
the influence of Goethe, though, unlike that serene 
master, Eichter got so tangled in his plot that the 
story appeared at last as a fragment (1792) ; but 
even in this form, its descriptions of nature, and 
scenes of emotion and sentiment, won for it a suc- 
cess that encouraged its author to move to Hof, 
where he mi^ht be more in touch with such intellec- 
tual life as the high-school there would afford. The 
result of this was seen in " Hesperus" (1795) where 
all the virtues, but also all the faults, of " The Invis- 
ible Lodge" were magnified. Formlessness rises 
here to an art, and approaches the labyrinthine eccen- 
tricities of " Tristram Shandy." AIL sorts of digres- 
sions interrupt the narrative, with the slenderest 
excuse, or even with none at all. The crudeness of 
style has become a mannerism, as marked as Car- 
lyle's. On the other hand, his power of emotional 
description has become greatly deepened and refined. 
All the delicate shades that separate the first dawn 
of love from its passionate expression are caught 
with wonderful discrimination ; and the lovers of 
" Werther," to whom Goethe had proved unfaith- 
ful, found in Jean Paul a new idol after their own 
hearts. 

Indeed even Goethe was hardly so enthusiastically 
loved by women as Jean Paul for his "Hesperus/ 



294 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



But in spite of their love and of the influence they 
exercised on his work, Eichter was too much an 
egoist to feel in himself that which his " erotic acad- 
emy " had taught him to analyze so well. The sen- 
timentality in "Hesperus" is simply stupendous. 
In theory, his love was to be wholly platonic. "I 
do not want the fairest face, but the fairest heart. 
I can overlook all spots on that, but none in this." 
" He does not love who sees his beloved, but he who 
thinks her." His heroes delight to exchange their 
thoughts on God and immortality in graveyards and 
the silence of night. " Give me two days, or one 
night, and I will fall in love with whomever you 
choose," says Viktor in " Hesperus." And love to 
him has so little personal or individual about it that 
he can write, " If the first kiss does not end love, the 
second, at most, will be its death." All this in 
theory. In practice, he flutters like a butterfly from 
flower to flower, and invents for his inconstancy 
such pretty names as " simultaneous love," " loving 
together," " loving at once," " general warmth," " uni- 
versal love," or, with a flight to more congenial Italy, 
" tutti love." Nay, he even makes it a rule " never to 
sacrifice one love to another." We have evidence of 
six more or less serious attachments during the com- 
position of " Hesperus." But aside from these social 
vagaries, this novel contains some very keen and 
good-humored satire. The German housewife reveals 
herself to us " stitched out, boiled out, washed out," 
many little deceits dear to feminine hearts are laid 
bare, and, in more serious vein, the finger is placed 



RICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 295 

on the political sores of Germany, though no pre- 
scription follows the diagnosis. 

Of the outward conditions under which the "Hes- 
perus " was written, Duering, his first biographer, thus 
informs us : " Eichter's study and sitting-room of- 
fered about this time a true and beautiful emblem of 
his simple yet noble mind, which took in both high 
and low. While his mother, who lived with him, 
bustled about her housework at stove or table, he 
sat in a corner of the same room at a plain writing- 
desk, with few or no books at hand, but only one or 
two drawers with excerpts and manuscripts. . . . 
Pigeons fluttered in and out of the chamber." It is 
a pretty picture, and adds significance to Eichter's 
beautiful words: "Unhappy is the man whose own 
mother has not made all other mothers venerable." 
It helps us to understand, too, how his work came to 
be so full of odds and ends, so scrappy. Poverty had 
hindered him from buying many books ; he had early 
formed a habit of copying out what he wanted. 
These drawers of excerpts left their mark on his 
style. 

Less ambitious than " Hesperus " were Jean Paul's 
next efforts, — " Quintus Fixlein " (1796), and " Sie- 
benkas." The latter, translated into English under 
the sub-title, " Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces," is a 
strange plea for the emancipation of genius from the 
laws of custom, or civil society, while the former is 
an idyl of family life, and perhaps at present the 
most read of his works. " Quintus Fixlein," like 
" Wuz," is a tale of education, and in a measure auto* 



296 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



biographical. Here the satire is directed against 
philological pedantry. Fixlein, ambitious of author- 
ship, proposes to make a study of misprints in Ger- 
man books, and of other equally laborious and fruit- 
less subjects, in the course of which he defends the 
use of Latin for scholarly conversation, because the 
Eomans of all classes used it on every occasion. But 
Quintus is very human. He takes off his hat as he 
passes under the windows of aristocracy ; he preaches 
longer than usual, that he may be sure to find his 
soup smoking hot on his return home. He has a 
spice of superstition too. His marriage, with the 
visit of the bridal pair to the graves of the loves that 
have gone before, is the fantastic gem of the book. 
But with all this, there is a strong under-current of 
democratic protest. " All sins," he had said in 
" Siebenkas," " arise from poverty, but there are joys 
and virtues in every class. Therefore, fiction should 
paint joy in poverty." 

Jean Paul's popularity now brought him invita- 
tions from Weimar, Berlin, and other courts, but his 
visits there were of surprisingly little value to him. 
Already he had made some effort to study his great 
contemporaries; but it is significant that this per- 
verse genius should have been most attracted by 
Schiller's " Ghost-Seer," — precisely that work of his 
which least attracts any one else. He went to Wei- 
mar in 1796. He found Wieland warm in his admi- 
ration ; and Frau von Stein, estranged from Goethe 
since his connection with Christiane, seemed to hope 
for some satisfaction to her wounded vanity by nurs- 



EICHTER AND THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. 297 

ing the fame of a promising rival to Goethe in popu- 
lar favor. But on the other hand, Schiller and Goethe 
had won their way to clear aesthetic conceptions, to 
a union of the classical with the German spirit ; they 
had fouoht the battle of the " Xenien " with the 
unruly spirits of the " Storm and Stress/' and with 
the placid philistinism of Mcolai. They were in no 
humor to commend the genial extravagance of Jean 
Paul. His popularity seemed to them a menace to 
the good cause of German culture, just as Schiller's 
had seemed to Goethe some years before. Each felt 
foreign to the other. Schiller said Kichter seemed to 
him like a man who had fallen from the moon. On 
the other hand, Jean Paul writes of Schiller's por- 
trait : "His nose struck me like lightning. It shows 
a cherub with the germ of the fall. It seems to 
exalt itself above everything, — above men, misfor- 
tune, and morals. I cannot take my eyes from this 
lofty face, to which it seems to be indifferent whose 
blood flows, others or its own." And again he says : 
" Yesterday I met the rock-bound Schiller, against 
whom, as against a cliff, all strangers are clashed 
back." An anxious chill ran through Eichter also, 
he tells us, as he entered Goethe's " palatial hall." 
" At last the god steps in, cold, monosyllabic, with 
no expression in his voice. . . . The figure is strong 
and fiery, his eye alight, but with no pleasant color." 
Yet when the titan read aloud "Alexis and Dora," it 
was " deep thunder mixed with light pattering rain," 
and "his heart shot flames through the icy crust." 
There was a side of Goethe's universality to which 



298 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

Eichter felt akin, but lie distrusted his " unrouged " 
infidelity, doubtless prompted thereto by Herder, and 
he returned to Hof, unable to adapt himself to the 
world or to his times. He came back to Weimar, 
however, in 1797; and went thence to Leipzig and 
Berlin, where he was much admired by many women 
and engaged himself at last to a charming Berlin 
girl, Caroline Mayer. His position at the time is 
indicated by the fact that Queen Luise of Prussia 
was the first to honor their betrothal with a gift. 
Eichter was married in May, 1801, and, after three 
years' wandering, settled in Bayreuth in 1804. 

Significant in this connection is a passage from 
the preface to " Fixlein " : "I could never find out 
but three ways to be happier, — not happy. The 
first way leads upward, and is to get out above the 
cloud of life so far that one sees the whole outer 
world, with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses, and light- 
ning-rods lie far beneath our feet like a shrivelled 
child's-garden. The second is to fall right down 
into the garden, and to nestle one's self so comfor- 
tably in a furrow that, when one looks out of one's 
warm lark's-nest, one sees also no wolf-dens, charnel- 
houses, and poles, but only the ears of grain, each of 
which is, for the nestling bird, a tree and a shelter 
from sun and rain. The third, finally, which I take 
to be the hardest and shrewdest, is to change between 
the two." The idea of purifying the charnel-house, 
of setting up the lightning-rod, or of clearing the 
wolf's den was and remained foreign to this delightful 
but unpractical man. 



RICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 299 

This is clear from his next novel, "Titan " (1800- 
1803), which he says is " my principal work and 
most complete creation. My whole being, with its 
virtues and faults, and the ideals of my soul are con- 
tained in it." His solution for all the problems of 
nature and society is God and immortality. " Titan " 
is force struggling with the divine harmony. Hence, 
as he observes, the book should rather be called 
" Anti-Titan," for it is ostensibly directed against the 
" storm and stress " of irregular genius. It purposes 
to show that idealism in thought and feeling must be 
mingled with realism if the thinker is to take an 
active part in the world. But this is precisely what 
Jean Paul fails to show, and the impracticability of 
his hero illustrates his own. 

Much the same might be said of the more popular 
" Flegeljahre " (1804-1805). Here a large part is 
clearly from his own experience, and some passages 
recall the severest of the early satires. Thus he 
speaks of a certain theological professor whose " stale 
lecture-room philosophy and theological half-knowl- 
edge, is one quarter moral, one quarter unmoral, one 
quarter intelligible, one quarter distorted, and the 
whole stolen." In the story, twin brothers, Walt and 
Vult, that is, Love and Knowledge, represent the 
contrast between the dreamy and the practical, both 
with a good deal in them of Eichter himself, — " op- 
posite magnets, they are continually drawn to each 
other, but when they meet are thrust asunder as by 
positive and negative electricity." The whole shows 
the influence of " Wilhelm Meister " more than any 



300 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



other work of Jean Paul. It was never finished, for 
his imagination was always quicker to bind knots 
than to loose them. This really is of small conse- 
quence, however. No one ever read the " Flegel- 
jahre," nor any other book of Jean Paul to study the 
development of plots or characters. One reads him 
as one reads Sterne, for the charming descriptions, 
humorous observations, and the delicate fancy that 
plays over all. 

After the " Flegeljahre " Eichter's talent begins to 
flag. He had no longer the spur of necessity to keep 
active his mind and pen. He gives us nothing more 
in the field of pure imagination that one is not glad 
to forgive and forget. But in these years he was to 
make valuable contributions to pedagogy, aesthetics, 
and politics. The "Levana" (1807), a group of dis- 
connected essays on education, begins with a study 
of the will, love, and religion. Then we find a di- 
gression on the beginning of mankind and of educa- 
tion, then sections on games and physical culture, 
and then a delightfully witty " Appendix " on the 
" Ideal Master of Ceremonies." There follows a dis- 
cussion of the education of princes and of women, for 
whose mis-culture under the prevalent German con- 
ditions he had only words of indignant protest. " Do 
I not see every week," he had written long before, 
" how souls are sacrificed so soon as they inhabit a 
female body ? Since, then, the richest and most gifted 
souls, ... if single, are disdained by • society, what 
wonder if they sink into the sheltered citizenship of 
marriage ; . . . and if the husband is a gentle jailer 



RICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 301 



the poor soul feels her lot supremely happy. . . . 
Sometimes, when a long buried idol of her once de- 
vout heart, or sad music, or a book, casts a warm ray 
on the winter sleep of her heart, she starts, looks 
around, and says : ' Once it was otherwise with me — 
long ago. I think I might have erred then' — and 
sleeps again." And in another place he says : " Pre- 
judices that are flowers for us are thistles for you. 
Your teachers, companions, even your parents, trample 
and crush the little flowers you shelter and cherish. 
Your hands are more used than your heads. They 
let you play only with your fans. Nothing is par- 
doned you, least of all a heart." 

The fundamental principles of this part of the 
" Levana " are that " Nature intends woman immedi- 
ately as mother, only mediately as wife," and that 
" Love is the life-spirit of the female soul, the main- 
spring of her nerves." She is to be " the Yesta of the 
home, not the Oceanid of the universal sea." Her 
most exalted calling is the training of her children. 
Girls should study natural history, astronomy, mathe- 
matics, and English. To these he regrets that they 
must still add French, so as to be prepared, as he 
maliciously says, for the quartering of French troops. 
Eichter returned often to this topic, and concludes 
his last allusion to it with the beneficent exhortation 
that " men should show more love, women more 
common-sense." 

The closing chapters of " Levana " seem to promise 
a more logical development. But even in its unfin- 
ished state it aroused great admiration. In pure 



302 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



literature, form is essential, here it was not. Goethe 
" did not know how to say enough good " of the ex- 
tracts he read, and found in them " a wonderful 
maturity " and " the boldest virtues, without the least 
excess." The praise is perhaps exaggerated ; but the 
book, and especially the portion on the education of 
women, was of much value in Germany, and might 
still be of much more. 

A high place must be given also to Eichter's 
"Primary School of ^Esthetics" (1805), which Car- 
lyle pronounces " abounding in noble views, and not- 
withstanding its frolicsome exuberance, in sound and 
subtle criticism." But he adds the caution : " We 
fear it might astonish many an honest brother of your 
(the critics') craft were he to read it, and altogether 
perplex and dash his maturest counsels if he chanced 
to understand it." Perhaps the latter sentence is as 
true as the former. The work certainly contains 
some things hard to be understood, though it is said 
by those who think they understand it to be superior 
to similar studies by Lessing and Schiller. It is 
based on an enthusiastic study of Herder, with whose 
glowing eulogy it closes. The most original, and to 
many the most valuable and interesting portion, is 
the keen analysis of humor, closing with a praise of 
wit, which he happily compares to chemical solvents, 
for only bodies chemically freed can make new com- 
pounds ; but wit dissolves ideas, and so by enabling 
them to combine in new forms, it is the father of 
originality. A chapter on style is more amusing 
than valuable, as we might expect, nor can it surprise 



EICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 303 



us to" learn that the "^Esthetics" also remained a 
fragment. 

The year after the publication of the " ^Esthetics " 
Napoleon crushed the Prussian power at Jena. It 
is interesting to see how in the period of humiliation 
and foreign conquest Richter's mind was stirred to 
more practical activity than had yet characterized it. 
In 1805, he could still write : " Did I certainly know 
that Napoleon was wrong, and as certainly all just 
ways to resist him, then it were easy to risk with the 
pen even life against him. But this uncertainty 
cripples fearfully the courage of a cosmopolitan who 
must see aims through results." But when Jena had 
come he doubted no longer, though by the courtesy 
of Bernadotte he was personally spared many of the 
annoyances of the French occupation. During all 
this period he forms a patriotic contrast to Goethe, 
who, as Knebel wrote to Richter, found this a favor- 
able time for studying osteology, " since every field 
was strewn with specimens." We have tried to ex- 
plain Goethe's position. Richter's is more fortunate 
in needing no explanation. His "Twilight Thoughts 
for Germany" (1809) and "Fast-Sermons during 
Germany's Martyr- Week" (1810-1812) were bold in 
their denunciations of Napoleon and the German 
sycophants who betrayed their nation to flatter him. 
And even higher civic virtue was shown in the " Fast 
Sermons" of 1817, which held up to scorn those Ger- 
man princes who had bought the popular support 
that restored them to their thrones with fair promises 
that they had no thought to fulfil. We can hardly 



304 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



realize now the boldness that dictated such words as 
these : " There are critical times in the political sky, 
decisive points for states. Let these times he held 
sacred. Such a time there was in Greece . . . after 
the victory over Xerxes ; such a time is working now 
in Germany after our victory over the new Xerxes. 
We are rid of the bitter past, but we are not masters 
of the ripe fruit-bearing future. Public spirit and 
sense for the commonweal must be nursed in the 
people, and that must be done by satisfying that 
spirit; the people must receive the higher good of 
free government in order to become afterward worthy 
of it. Only a parliament, I repeat, a parliament, can 
rouse the people to a public spirit." " Cultured peo- 
ples are by culture itself protected by a double shield 
against tyranny." 

This was said in a time of political reaction, when 
the boldest were silenced, exiled, or imprisoned. It 
showed that the misfortunes of Germany and the 
glories of the War of Liberation had roused in Eichter 
that practical sense, that realism, which contact with 
the great master of German objective literature had 
not stirred. How different might have been his place 
had these political changes taken place in his youth. 
They found him capable of enlarged ideas, but rooted 
in a narrow past. He could not begin life anew. 
His style remained as hopelessly quaint as ever, and 
this made him a sealed book to coming generations, 
who had little patience with fantastic dreaming, 
however beautiful. It is for this reason that he 
had no imitators. There was nothing in his work 



RICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 305 



worth imitating but his genius, and genius defies 
imitation. 1 

In the latter years of his life Eichter travelled 
much, visiting Heidelberg, Stuttgart, and Munich. 
Everywhere he was received with distinguished honor. 
Among his latest works the " Evergreen of the Feel- 
ings " is one of the shortest, and perhaps also the 
best. The " Comet," his last and wildest novel 
(1820-1822), opens with the strange confession that 
hitherto he has yielded too much to rules of art, " like 
a child born curled and forced straight by a swathing 
cushion." But now he proposes to let himself go ; 
and a wonderful crazy tale he makes of it, full of 
wild, but often very comic fancies. 

Mental and physical disease troubled Eichter's last 
years. Already, in 1817, he whites of the "twilight 
of his life and death." His friends were passing 
away, and gloom was added to pain by partial blind- 
ness. He died on the 18th of November, 1825. On 
the second of that December, Ludwig Borne, who, 
perhaps, of all the following generation stood intel- 
lectually closest to him, pronounced in the Museum at 
Frankfort a funeral oration, which is his most glori- 
ous monument, and indeed one of the masterpieces 
of German eloquence. " A star has sunk," he said, 
" and the eye of this century will close before it ap- 
pears again, for bright genius circles in wide orbits, 
and our late descendants will first bid joyous welcome 

1 Paul Nerrlich, in his "Jean Paul, sein Leben und seine 
Werke " (1889), calls Richter " the predecessor of Borne and Heine," 
it is hard to see why. 

20 



306 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

to him from whom their grieving fathers once took 
sad leave. We will mourn for him whom we have 
lost, and mourn, too, for those others who have not 
lost him, for he did not live for all. Yet a time will 
come when he will be born for all, and then all will 
bewail him. But he stands patient at the door of 
the twentieth century, and waits smiling until his 
creeping people come to meet him." 

This is an eloquent vision, but we are approaching 
that twentieth century, and we cannot feel that we 
are approaching nearer to Richter. Rather we should 
say that Jean Paul remains a phenomenon of literary 
isolation, in his development as in his prime. Very 
popular with multitudes for a considerable period, 
still highly prized by a few, his work is without not- 
able influence on the currents of German literature, 
much more so than that of the far less talented men 
to whom we now turn our attention, the founders of 
the Romantic School. 

Historically the Romantic School carries us back 
to Berlin and to that Nicolai, once the intelligent 
friend and patron of Lessing, but who, unfortunately, 
seemed capable of learning only from him, and after 
his death saw nothing but retrogression in the pro- 
gress of Herder, Schiller, and Goethe, while he was 
meantime fighting valiantly for what he mistook to 
be Lessing's critical ideas, preaching a philosophy of 
such dreary sobriety and common-sense as to earn for 
himself the name, Goliath of the Philistines. By 
his extreme views Nicolai gradually provoked a re- 



RICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 307 



volt among his own disciples, who sought shelter 
first with Herder, then under the banner of Schiller 
and Goethe. But they could not follow them in the 
classical renaissance which their combined labors at- 
tempted, and so these hot-headed recruits set up a 
school of their own, with an attempt at new literary 
principles, which their inventors, Friedrich and Wil- 
helm Schlegel, called Romantic. 

Not indeed as though they broke, or could break, 
wholly with the past. It has been shown once and 
again 1 that they did but transplant into other soil 
seeds sown by Winkelmann and Lessing, Klopstock 
and Wieland ; that Schiller's aesthetic theories, Goethe's 
poetry, and Herder's appreciation for foreign litera- 
tures never ceased to be powerful among them, more, 
perhaps, than the Romanticists suspected, for they pro- 
claimed themselves innovators and radical reformers 
of literature. 

The true relation of this whole movement to Goethe 
and Schiller has been most clearly apprehended by 
Hettner, who shows, in his book on the Romantic 
School, that both shared in the error of supposing 
that a true poetry could be artificially created in an 
unpoetic age, that poetry did not have its source in 
its time and environment, but could venture to defy 
them. The common basis of the Romantic School 
and of the Classicists is idealism, but this idealism 
may be subjective or objective. Goethe, and to a less 

1 For instance, by Gervinus and J. Schmidt, in their histories of 
German literature, and by Hettner and Haym in their special works 
on the Romantic School. 



308 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



degree Schiller, were objective, and in so far they were 
realists ; the Eomanti cists abandoned reality wholly. 
They did not seek to create from it, but they set the 
imagination to overcome it. This struggle is their 
whole history as a school. From this comes their 
inclination to the Middle Ages and the East, as the 
natural opposites to plastic and realistic antiquity. 
In the national life of their own time, neither they 
nor any one else could find poetic inspiration. 1 
In teaching that art was independent of nature, 
Schiller confessed the idealist principle, and Goethe 
followed in this path for a time, just as earlier, in 
"Werther," he had echoed the subjective idealistic 
revolt against the sane objectivity which conforms to 
the order of the world. To that serener vision the 
Italian journey ultimately brought Goethe, but "he 
remained alone on the solitary height." 2 Eichter 
is here at one with the Eomanticists, but he is 
healthier than any of them, always opposing the real 
to the ideal in sharp, irreconcilable contrast, while 
* Wilhelm Meister " had put the reconciliation of the 
ideal with reality as the goal and summit of all cul- 
ture ; and at the other extreme, Schlegel thought 
the " Marchen " the only natural form of fiction, 
because it alone was wholly divorced from nature 
and reality. 

1 So Schiller says : " Ah, noch lehen die Sanger, Nur felilen 
die Thaten die Lyra Freudig zu wecken." 

2 Goethe's period of art independent of nature is represented hy 
the " Achilleis," "Pandora,"' "Die Naturliche Tochter," and the 
" Allegories." 



RICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 309 

It is difficult to define precisely the aim of the 
Eomanticists. One of themselves said that it was 
" to put sentimental material in fantastic form." In 
their protest against Classicism, they were led to 
exalt unduly the idea over its form, which in each 
case was to adapt itself to the idea, and, in this Pro- 
tean condition, might defy all rule and criticism save 
the purely subjective. Here fancy is law, chaos 
order. The idealism of Fichte and Schelling takes 
the place of the white light of Spinoza's philosophy, 
and the healthy worldly wisdom of Goethe. " Fichte's 
' Wissenschaftslehre ' was the hinge on which Classi- 
cism turned to Eomanticism. . . . This remarkable 
man ranges himself as the last of the representatives 
of the older, and also at the head of the younger gen- 
eration." By his teaching of philosophic egoism, 
Kant's rationalism was brought in touch with the 
imaginative literature of the time. From Fichte 
came the romantic " irony " that seemed to play with 
truth, and left the reader always uncertain of the real 
purpose of the writer ; from Schelling came the mys- 
ticism ; both of course more noticeable in the critics 
than in the novelists of the school, — in the Schlegels 
than in Novalis or the young Tieck. Probably no 
other people in Europe would have been so much 
affected by metaphysical considerations. No German 
of that time, however, felt himself complete without 
a philosophy of the world and of life. As Eichter 
said, "The French held the kingdom of the laud, 
the English of the sea, the Germans of the air." 
Philosophy fettered Ricbter. It was the cause of life 



310 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

and the sentence to death of the Romantic School, 
which certainly did harm to the healthy development 
of German literature, whatever we may think of the 
influence of the corresponding philosophy on German 
thought. Eccentricity came to pass for originality ; 
the 'wildest freaks of a sickly fancy were greeted with 
delight. One reads to-day with nauseated impatience 
what was once regarded with ecstatic admiration. 

On the other hand, these men did much to direct 
attention, in Herder's spirit, to the beauties and 
strength of foreign literatures, both by translations 
and imitations, and, in so far as these crowded from 
view such phrase-twisters as Imand and Kotzebue, 
the world had no loss to mourn. Better than all, we 
owe to them the impulse to the first study of the 
earlier German literature and life, which bore such 
noble scientific fruit in the philologists of the next 
generation, and, in its more popular manifestations, 
was a powerful factor in rousing the national spirit 
to shake off the yoke of Napoleon. But if for this 
patriots might thank them, they could not but dis- 
approve their blind admiration for mediaeval insti- 
tutions, which led many of them to the bosom of the 
Koman Church. While the Romantic School con- 
tributed much to the revival of Christianity in Ger- 
many that marks the early years of this century, 
in politics their influence was decidedly reactionary, 
and that at a time when feelings were much embit- 
tered. This political aspect of the Eomantic School 
emphasized the disfavor into which it could not but 
fall when the liberal cause became popular among the 



RICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 311 



educated of Germany. Indeed, the word, as it is 
used among journalists in that country to-day, has 
usually a political significance. 

The chief followers of the Schlegels were Tieck, 
Novalis, Brentano, Eichendorff, Fouque, and Hoff- 
mann. It is not necessary to our purpose to examine 
their work in detail, but it is important to a right com- 
prehension of Heine, the last great name in German 
literature, that one should not ignore this significant 
phase of the literary life of Germany during the last 
thirty years of Goethe's life and the time of Heine's 
young manhood. 

Wilhelm Schlegel, though least productive in pure 
literature, was, through his critical ability, the leader 
of the movement. Assimilating from Lessing his 
sound reason, from Herder his loving sensitiveness, 
he unites to manliness of judgment a feminine recep- 
tivity for the manifold forms of the beautiful. More 
sympathetic than Lessing, firmer than Herder, he 
exceeds both in objectivity and faithfulness. 1 But 
he was rather an illuminating than a constructive 
critic. To him and to Tieck, Germany owes a mas- 
terly translation of Shakspere. He was also the 
impresario of Madame de StaeTs literary journeyings, 
and a pretty constant member of her household from 
1802 to 1817, and so he influenced very materially the 
opinions of that great critic in her book on Germany, 
which was long an unquestioned authority both in 
France and England. 

Perhaps more talented, and certainly more eccen- 

1 So Haym, Romantische Schule, 168. 



312 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



trie, was Wilhelm's younger brother, Friedrich, who 
married Dorothea Veit, a daughter of Lessing's friend 
Mendelssohn, a lady who, as Schlegel assured a 
friend, a had no sense for anything in or out of the 
world but love, music, wit, and philosophy." A sig- 
nificant climax. This may help to explain why she 
had procured a divorce from her former husband in 
order to marry the talented but perverse critic. 1 
For Friedrich Schlegel had a real passion for singular- 
ity, and placed himself in opposition to all existing 
notions of aesthetics or morals, both in the drama 
" Alarkos " and in his novel " Lucinde," which he de- 
scribes as a Sapphic poem, and " the most artistic of 
all works of art that we have." What he means by 
this appears early in the work itself, where he 
declares : " For me and for this work, for my love 
for it and for its formation, no purpose is more pur- 
poseful than this, that I destroy in the very begin- 
ning what we call order, separate it entirely from 
it, take to myself frankly the right of a charming 
confusion, and assert my right by my action." But 
his brother, and a considerable section of the public, 
did not scruple to call the book " a foolish rhapsody." 2 
Intrinsically, the " Lucinde " is not worth study, or 

1 August Schlegel was also twice divorced, and indeed for a time 
divorce threatened to become epidemic among the Romanticists. 

2 This is gentle criticism of a bdok whose hero is at once 
actor and critic, speaking now as Lucinde's lover, now as the author 
of a narrative, which is itself interrupted by letters, sensuous reflec- 
tions, and " metamorphoses," a cynical chapter on the philosophy 
of propagation. The whole ends with what is fitly called " Sports of 
Fancy" (Tandeleien der Phantasie). 



EICHTEK AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 



313 



even mention. It is planless, and, in spite of its 
shameless autobiography, dull. Other Eomanticists 
were at the time more popular. But it had consider- 
able influence on the development of modern fiction, 
for it was one of the first and most extreme of a 
long series of novels that preached the " emancipa- 
tion of women," and the general lawlessness that this 
position seemed to involve. 

Disappointed in Germany, Schlegel went to Paris, 
turned Roman Catholic, and made studies in San- 
skrit that mark a new epoch in the science of Com- 
parative Philology. Though he returned to Germany 
in 1808, his literary work was afterward insig- 
nificant. His real importance in this field is confined 
to a few years, and largely to the critical journal 
"Das Athenaeum," which he founded in opposition 
to the " heavenly twins " of Weimar. It was left for 
Tieck and Novalis to practise what the Schlegels 
had preached. 

Tieck was born in Berlin (1773), and was the first 
of her sons to distinguish himself greatly in literature. 
He studied in Halle, Erlangen, and Gottingen, and 
while there wrote student-songs destined to outlive 
his riper work. On his return to Berlin, he began 
writing novels for the publisher Nicolai, whose comic 
side tickled Tieck's satiric fancy, and led him over, 
towards the close of the century, to the open arms of 
the Schlegels, — a desertion that provoked Nicolai the 
more because he had been betrayed into publishing him- 
self Tieck's keenest satire on his own critical theories, 
"Bluebeard, a Nursery Tale in Four Acts" (1797). 



314 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



The next butt of Tieck's satire was the voluminous 
platitudes of Kotzebue and other imitators of the 
worn-out period of " Storm and Stress." But " Puss 
in Boots" had neither the earnestness nor the passion 
to make it more than a plaything of fancy ; and indeed 
this fault followed him through life, even after he 
broke with the principles of the Eomantic School, 
and, with occasional relapses, became essentially 
realistic. So that, although he had studied Goethe 
from boyhood, and made "Wilhelm Meister" the 
model for his popular artist romance, "Sternbald's 
Wanderings " (1798), he never became master of his 
genius, but let it guide him where it would. The 
realistic grasp of life that made the strength of 
" Meister " was lacking to all the Eomanticists. We 
see this in the artificiality of Tieck's characters, and 
in the loosening of social ties which is thus proclaimed 
by Sternbald's teacher, Florestan : " The proprieties of 
your common prosaic life are not permissible in art. 
In these pure regions they are unseemly ; they are, 
between ourselves, the document of our vulgarity 
and immorality." According to this artist's philos- 
ophy, it is not possible to forget one's purpose, 
because " an intelligent man so orders his life as not 
to have any." This is certainly true of the char- 
acters of Tieck's story. Whether they are " intel- 
ligent" (verniinftig) or not, its readers must decide. 
This may serve to show why, though many read 
Tieck for pastime, his work, especially in this earlier 
romantic period, lacks claim to a permanent place in 
literature, and was indeed dead before his death. 



RICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 315 

Far more fanciful and mystic than Tieck had ever 
been was Friedrich von Hardenberg, commonly called 
Novalis. He had, to be sure, the excuse of a great 
tragedy in early life, — the death of his betrothed. 
Hence sprang those "Hymns to the Night," which, in 
the opinion of a German critic, 1 are " deeply thought- 
ful notes, full of lament, and melancholy rapture, and 
burning pain, which can be compared with nothing that 
our classical literature has produced;" perhaps, we 
may add, because nothing in classical literature 
could, in the nature of the case, be so morbidly sen- 
timental or so sentimentally morbid. He had nursed 
this disease on Fichte's theory of the will, and read 
industriously Young's " Night Thoughts," — far infe- 
rior efforts in the same sickly kind. But let Novalis 
speak for himself. He will tell us how, when " the 
inspiration of night, the slumber of heaven," came 
over him, " the hill became a misty cloud. Through 
the cloud I saw the transfigured features of my love. 
In her eyes rested eternity. I seized her hand, and 
the tears became a sparkling, unbroken chain. Mil- 
lenniums passed off into the distance like thunder- 
clouds. On her neck I wept enrapturing tears at my 
new life." 

All this is very pretty, and so is his wish " to keep 
his wound forever open," to turn from this vulgar 
day of ours and live in "the holy, mysterious, hun- 
dred-eyed night," which he who had once enjoyed 
would never exchange for light, that hurries to its 
end "in eternal restlessness." But alas for poor 
1 Haym, Romantische Schule, 336. 



316 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



human nature ! — or shall we rather say, thanks to 
human nature ? — having indited these hymns, he soon 
found another maid to his mind, as well as the con- 
genial literary society of Tieck and the Schlegels. 
His next enthusiasm was for the new Prussian king, 
Friedrich Wilhelm III., who, according to Novalis's 
loyal hopes, was to bring a golden age, and, as we 
know, actually brought the disgrace of Jena, and the 
greater disgrace of the broken promises of the Holy 
Alliance. His new patriotism was as unreasoning 
as his old affection. " One must live in the State as 
in one's beloved," he says. " The greater the taxes, 
the greater the needs of the State, the more perfect 
the State," and the more worthy of affection. His 
conversion was thorough ; his ideal, " one lord, one 
family." The king is for him " a man exalted to be an 
earthly fate ; " and to be an official at his court is " the 
brightest festival of a lifetime, a cause for life-long 
enthusiasm." As for Queen Luise, she fills the poet 
"with a holy glow, and tunes the lyre to soft, heav- 
enly melodies." 1 When Germans remember the 
weak, faint-hearted, vacillating man who roused such 
dithyrambic enthusiasm, it is difficult to think with 
patience of the gentle Novalis. 

Natural science now beqan to interest him much, 
after his way ; not that he would learn about plants 
and insects, but rather " that they might show me 
the way where in deep sleep the maiden lies for 
whom my soul is yearning." In this frame of mind 
he wrote his first novel, " The Disciples of Sais," a 
1 Hajm, 1. c. 345. 



EICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 317 



sort of allegory of nature as a revelation of Fichte's 
ego, and not without value as a memorial of this age 
of scientific ferment. To Novalis " the secret of 
nature is nothing else than the fulfilled longing of a 
loving heart." 

This mental state and the influence of Tieck natu- 
rally placed him in opposition to the worldly wisdom 
of "Wilhelm Meister." That Wilhelm should de- 
scend to being a useful member of a democratic 
society, when he might have been a poet, or even a 
transcendental philosopher and reformer, such as 
Fichte, was too much for Novalis. He resolved to 
correct this aspersion on German impracticability, 
and gave the world his " Heinrich von Ofterdingen," 
a novel whose influence on the reading pabulum of 
the uncultured masses has not yet ceased. Here 
Goethe's serenity is exchanged for dreamy enthusiasm, 
where we seem to move in a mild fairy land amid 
misty myths that lift at times to give us brief glimpses 
of reality, only to close suddenly again upon us. No- 
valis always means to be clear, but his eloquent and 
poetic fecundity is ever again tempting him to leave 
the earth and soar. 

Infused with what its author calls " magical ideal- 
ism," " Ofterdingen " becomes a sort of " mythology 
of history," realizing the definition that "romantic 
poetry consists in the pleasant art of surprising, of 
making an object strange and yet familiar and attrac- 
tive," which is his rather vague literary creed. For 
the writer of " Ofterdingen " the real world does not 
exist. He lives in the dream and wonderland of his 



318 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



fantasy. There is no terra firma here, but through it 
all the sweetest lyric and frostiest symbolism are 
mingled, until at last all flows together in one great, 
bottomless allegory. 1 

Novalis did not live to finish " Ofterdingen " nor 
to develop his theory. He died in 1800. u Ofter- 
dingen " lived on, however. It is a tale of the Middle 
Ages, the favorite epoch of the Eomanticists. The 
hero is a German poet, not wholly obscure, and 
Novalis tells us he meant the story to be " an apothe- 
osis of poetry." Perhaps a plain, blunt man will 
better offer an extract than attempt a critical account, 
however brief, of this " apotheosis" that never "apo- 
theosizes ; " for the novel was abandoned after the 
beginning of the second part, withering because it 
had no depth of earth, no root in realism. Here is 
an extract from the very beginning : " The old people 
were asleep already. The clock ticked monotonously 
on the wall. The wind blustered on the rattling 
windows. Now and again the brightness of the moon 
lighted the room. The youth lay restless on his 
couch and thought of the stranger and his tales. 
' 'T is not the treasures,' said he to himself, ' that have 
roused in me so unspeakable desire. Far from me is 
all greed. 'T is the Blue Flower that I long to be- 
hold. It lives ever in my heart. I can think and 
dream of naught else.' " The Blue Flower, we may 
explain, is " Poesy," and when he attained a morning 
vision of it, it showed a beautiful face, which he recog- 
nized later in Matilda, whom therefore he loved after 

1 Cp. Hettner, 1. c. 84. 



KICHTER AND THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL. 



319 



his kind. Let us listen to him. He is standing at 
the window. " Ye everlasting stars, ye silent wan- 
derers, I call you to witness my sacred oath. For 
Matilda I will live, and everlasting faith shall unite 
my heart and hers. For me, too, the morn of an 
eternal day is dawning. The night is passed. I 
kindle myself as an inextinguishable sacrifice to the 
rising sun." This is the way the writers of our popu- 
lar weekly story papers would write if they could, and 
it is the model in style for the back-stairs literature 
of feminine Germany, for what is called the "Col- 
portage-roman," in ten pfennig parts, to-day. But in 
his and the next generation Novalis and his novel 
were the admiration of the aristocracy, and not in Ger- 
many alone. Carlyle, in commending German writers 
to English readers, selects Novalis as one whose " pe- 
rusal and reperusal he could recommend with perfect 
confidence," — a curious comment on the shifting of 
popular taste. Nevertheless, individual passages in 
the novel are charming, and some of the lyrics inter- 
spersed in it are of permanent value. The style is 
always easy, often musical ; and when Novalis con- 
descends to bend his flight to earth the descriptions 
are admirably vivid ; as, for instance, that of his hero's 
betrothal. But the kernel of the book, the " apothe- 
osis of poetry," would hardly be regarded to-day as 
within the sphere of prose fiction. 

The most extreme of the romantic novelists was 
Brentano, grandson of that Sophie von Laroche who 
had attracted Wieland and the young Goethe, and 
brother of Goethe's adoring Bettina von Arnim. His 



320 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



" Godwi, or the Mother's Stone Image," out-heroded 
the " Lucinde " in its wild passion. One of the songs 
interspersed in it, " Zu Bacharach am Eeine," itself 
meritorious, is the origin of Heine's famous " Lorelei." 
Some years after this he, with Von Arnim, had the 
happy inspiration to collect and publish what could 
be recovered of the old popular songs of Germany. 
This collection, " Des Knaben Wimderhorn," is, says 
Grisebach, " the most national of all our books, — a 
gospel of genuine poetry . . . everywhere a mirror of 
this world, of reality, and of a special nationality. . . . 
National virtues and national vices show themselves 
here ; the pure and the impure is presented with equal 
naivete', pagan joy of life, and the sweetest inspira- 
tions of Christianity." The book acquired immedi- 
ately an immense national importance, which was 
reflected in the lyrics of the time, and so it both 
stimulated and aided the efforts of the patriots to 
restore a national life to their subjugated country. 
The rest of Brentano's work may be covered with 
the charitable mantle of oblivion, which might be 1 
stretched over Von Arnim, also, were it not that in 
his later years he, like Tieck, freed himself in some 
degree from Eomanticism and in his unfinished novel, 
" Die Kronen wachter," gave so realistic a picture of 
the time of the Beformation that, were the work 
completed, it would perhaps be read with pleasure 
to-clay. 

A more enduring literary life than came to any of 
these men was the lot of Heinrich von Kleist, whose 
melodrama " Katchen von Heilbronn " is still beloved 



RICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 321 

of the German middle class. Heinrich was of the 
old nobility, son of a Prussian officer, and had dis- 
tinguished himself by patriotic activity during the 
Napoleonic rule. His dramas, the " Prince of Ham- 
burg," and especially "Die Hermannsschlacht," reflect 
the fierce hate and bitterness of 1810. The latter 
was not put on the stage till 1875, when it achieved 
great success, due perhaps as much to its spirit as to 
its intrinsic merits. For this reason, too, there is a 
tendency at present to over-estimate Kleist in Ger- 
many, as though to atone for the too great neglect 
that he endured in his life, until he ended it by 
suicide, in 1811. His friend, Frau Henriette Vogel, 
shared his fate by request. There was a streak of 
insanity in many of the early Eomanticists. 

Among the younger followers of the school, who 
were usually but partial followers of its teaching, one 
may note Uhland (1787-1862), author of several pop- 
ular ballads, who was related to the Eomanticists rather 
by his mediaeval tastes and studies than by his style, 
which is peculiarly graceful, easy, and precise. His 
patriotic and self-sacrificing political labors marked 
him as a man of action, and distinguished him from 
such day-dreamers as Novalis. Another partial ally 
of the Eomanticists was the theologian Schleier- 
macher, who ingeniously applied their tenets to re- 
ligion and placed its seat in the feelings. 1 Others 
whose names are still familiar were Eichendorff, 
who wrote the popular "Life of a Good-for-Nothing " 

1 " Schleiermacher," being translated, is "maker of veils," — 
not inappropriate in view of his relation to German theology. 

21 



322 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



and several pretty songs, and De la Motte Fouque\ 
the author of " Undine." Here, also, may claim a 
place Bettina von Arnim, whose " Correspondence 
of Goethe with a Child," in spite of its biographical 
pretence, may fairly rank as an original production. 
One may name also among the straggling followers 
of romanticism Clauren, whose sickly sentimentality 
Heine has made a by-word, and Hauff, whose " Lich- 
tenstein " is still read with pleasure as an historical 
romance. But their influence did not outlast the 
great change that came over the German spirit in 
the next generation. The list may be closed with the 
erratic genius Hoffmann (1776-1822), who cultivate d 
the weirdly bizarre, somewhat in the fashion of Poe. 
His absolute emancipation from all literary rule is 
the only tie that binds him to the old Romanticists ; 
nor have these products of an unbalanced imagina- 
tion any important place in the development of Ger- 
man fiction, for though his popularity called forth a 
plentiful crop of ghost and demon tales, none of his 
imitators added anything of value to literature. 

So when Goethe died the Romantic School was even 
more a thing of the past than the classic realism 
against which it had rebelled. It was but an eddy 
iu the literary current, so strong, indeed, that for a 
time some might have mistaken it for the current 
itself. Taking exclusively the idealistic side of 
Schiller and of the universal Goethe, they developed 
it in the only new direction that was left to them, 
and in doing this, they wrote the " mene tekel," the 
reductio ad absurdum, of pure idealism in literature. 
J 



KICHTER AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 323 



For every great literature, and even every great liter- 
ary work must have its roots deep in the heart of 
popular life if it is to create true " nurslings of im- 
mortality." It must draw its nourishment from the 
bosom of reality, not " dreaming like a love-adept " 
from the lips of the sleeping poet. 



324 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



CHAPTER X. 

HEINRICH HEINE. 1 

Heinrich Heine is called by Matthew Arnold " the 
continuator of Goethe ; " he calls himself the last of 
the Romanticists. It is hard to define simply so 
complex a character ; but however critics may differ 
as to what he was, all will agree that he is the only 
writer of primary importance with whom German 
literature has had to reckon since Goethe's death. 
Any effort to comprehend his peculiar genius will 
demand a sympathetic study of the conditions of his 
life and of the occasions that called forth the works 
by which he must be judged. 

" Your grandfather was a little Jew and had a big 
beard," was the answer the inquisitive boy received 
to a question about his ancestry. The " little Jew " 
seems to have been in very moderate circumstances ; 

1 Sharp's " Life of Heinrich Heine," 1880, contains a good bibliog- 
raphy of the earlier Heine literature, to which ma}' be added ; Von 
Embden, " Faniilienleben Heinrich Heines," translated by De Kay: 
"Family Life of Heinrich Heine," 1893. Some quite successful 
translations of Heine's lyrics are to be found in Hellman, " Lyrics 
and Ballads of Heine," etc., 1892. Attention may be called also to 
some private letters of Heine in " Revue Hebdonmdaire," vii. 298, 
614, and to the reminiscences by Garnier in "Revue Bleue," 1. 267. 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



325 



but all his sons made their way to a competence, and 
one of them, Solomon, Heinrich's uncle, became one 
of the wealthiest bankers in Hamburg. Heinrich's 
father was less successful, and takes but a small 
place in his life. His mother, Betty, as he called her, 
played the chief part in the history of his develop- 
ment. She was a literary woman, who read and 
prized Goethe, though she did her best to keep her 
son from the thorny paths of poetry. "She was 
health itself in reason and feeling. I did not get 
from her," he says, " my tendency to the fantastic and 
romantic." Bather we may say she was to him that 
Diana, who, with the French fairy Abunde and the 
fair Jewess, Herodias, appeared to him as control- 
ling spirits in his " Atta Troll." To her we may 
trace the joy of life in his character, that spirit that 
made him kin to Goethe. The love of the son for 
the mother, even in his last days of long and racking 
illness, is the best witness to her sterling character. 
" Strange man," said his physician ; " he thinks only 
of providing for his wife and of hiding his state from 
his mother." 

Heine was born in Diisseldorf, December 13, 1799. 
It is a bit of humorous misstatement when he defers 
the date to January 1st, in order that he may call 
himself " one of the first men of the century." He 
was a rather precocious boy, and had hardly learned 
to read before he discovered the charm of " Don 
Quixote." " I was a child," he says in his delightful 
account of these early years, "and I knew nothing 
about the irony that God had put into his world, and 



326 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



that the great poet had imitated in his little printed 
world, and I could shed the bitterest tears when the 
noble knight for all his nobility got only ingratitude 
and blows." A naivete which never wholly deserted 
hirn in after life manifested itself amusingly in the 
boy who buried a pair of his long stockings expecting 
them to grow into breeches for his father. 

He went to school at the Franciscan convent and 
afterward at the Lyceum, then a Jesuit academy ; so 
that the Judaism of the family cannot have been very 
strict. He says he used to kiss the hand of every 
Capuchin monk that passed. " I was always a poet, 
and so the poetry that blooms and grows in the sym- 
bolism of Catholic dogma and worship naturally re- 
vealed itself to me more deeply than to others. ... I 
often grew fervid for the highly blessed Queen of 
Heaven, and put the legends of her grace and good- 
ness into pretty rhymes. My first collection of 
poems has traces of this fair Madonna period." 

Probably, all this is a little magnified by the mist 
of years, yet it shows an earnest side to the boy's 
life. But how shall we reconcile it with that other 
delicious tale, of the same period where the French 
abbd, his teacher, " six times asked me the question : 
' Heinrich, what is der Glaube in French ? ' And six 
times, and each time with a greater burst of tears, did 
I answer him : ' It is le credit.' The seventh time, his 
face purple with wrath, the angry teacher cried : ' It 
is la religion.' And a rain of blows came down on me, 
and all the other boys burst out laughing. Never 
since can I hear la religion named without a shiver." 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



327 



Iii addition to these Catholic influences, Heine was 
allowed, at fourteen, to attend lectures in French 
philosophy, and the result of it all was to make a 
skeptic of the young man before he had acquired 
any faith to lose. He often alludes to his school life 
in later works, usually with good-humored fun at the 
contrast between what he was set to learn and the 
needs of modern life. He tells us how he had to 
commit to memory the Eoman kings, and dates, and 
the nouns that take im in the accusative, and the 
irregular verbs ; " and this," he adds, gravely, " was 
very important, for if I had not learned by heart the 
Eoman kings it would have been quite indifferent to 
me afterward whether Niebuhr had proved, or had 
not proved, that there never were any." It was lucky, 
he said, that the Komans did not have to learn Latin, 
else they would never have had time to conquer the 
world. " About Greek I won't say much ; I should 
get too angry. The monks of the Middle Ages were 
not so wrong when they said it was an invention of 
the devil. God knows wdiat I endured over it." 
With Hebrew it went better ; but geography was 
discouraging, because the French conquests changed 
the boundaries every year, " and the lands all needed 
to be newly illuminated." Natural history had been 
a source of much pleasure to him, because in his 
acquaintances of later years he could recognize the 
apes, kangaroos, and rhinoceroses of which he had 
studied. In mythology " it delighted him to see with 
what gay nudity that pack of gods ruled the world." 
" I could have died for France, but I could not write 



328 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



French verses." For music he had no taste, and he 
came to blows with his dancing-master. 

So long as the French ruled Diisseldorf (1795-1801 
and 1805-1814) the Jews enjoyed equal political rights 
there, and the young Heine seems never to have suf- 
fered from the race prejudice that is still strong in some 
parts of Germany. This he felt he owed to France. 
" To the friends of freedom," he says, " Napoleon ap- 
peared as a rescuer." He was eleven years old when 
he first saw (Nov. 2, 1810) the arbiter of Europe, 
riding down the main w ? alk of Dusseldorfs court 
garden, " where it was forbidden to ride under five 
thalers fine." " The picture will never vanish from 
my memory," he said, years afterward. " I see him 
still, high on horseback, with those eternal eyes in his 
marble imperator face, quiet as destiny, looking down 
on the guards marching by ; and the old grenadiers 
looked up to him in awful submission, stern accom- 
plices, deathly proud : Te, Ccesar, morituri salutant." 
For many years Heine had for Napoleon a kind of 
hero-worship, and he never lost his contempt for the 
Germans of the coalition that overcame the Titan at 
last. 

'With the patriotism of the War of Liberation 
(1814) Heine had therefore little sympathy. He 
thought " it contracted the heart, so that men learned 
to hate what was foreign, and in ceasing to be citizens 
of the world became only narrowly German." And 
indeed whatever of nobility there had been in the 
popular rising of that time was bitterly deceived and 
mocked by the faithlessness of the German princes. 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



329 



Heine loved greatness, and the politics of the time 
showed only contemptible pettiness. No reproach 
belongs to him that he found small inspiration of 
patriotism in the thirty years that followed Waterloo. 

His parents proposed to make a merchant of him. 
He had learned English and French, and was study- 
ing Italian. But just at this time he began to write 
poetry, true poetry, possibly first of all under the 
star of that Veronica of whom he speaks so tenderly 
in the Beisebilder, but whose identity none has yet 
been able to establish. Yet she seems something 
more than the play of a poet's imagination. 1 

But other loves soon busied his young fancy. Es- 
pecially characteristic is his attachment for the exe- 
cutioner's daughter, Josepha, Das rothe Sefchen, the 

1 "Oh, God," he says, "once the world was so fair, and the 
birds sang thy eternal love, and little Veronica looked at me with 
her silent eyes, and we sat by the marble statue on the castle square 
— on one side is the old ruined castle where there are ghosts, and a 
lady in black silk, with no head, wanders about with a long, rustling 
train. On the other side is a high white building, in whose upper 
stories the bright pictures with their golden frames gleamed weirdly, 
and in whose basement so many great books were standing. I and 
little Veronica used to look at them often with curiosity when the 
good Ursula lifted us up to the great windows. Later, when I be- 
came a big boy, I climbed every day the highest rounds of the 
ladder and pulled down the tallest books and read in them so long 
that I feared nothing more, least of all headless ladies, and I got so 
clever that I forgot all the old games and stories and pictures and 
little Veronica, and even her name." Yet he did not forget, for to 
the end of his life he spoke with emotion of his " Little Veronica." 
"You can hardly imagine how pretty she looked as she lay in her 
little coffin," he says elsewhere, suggesting that this first boyish 
passion had a tragic end. Kohut, 1. c. 52 ff., thinks that the 
" Reseda " (Mignonette) of early poems refers to her. 



330 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



subject of several poems and of the most poetic epi- 
sode in his Memoirs, in which occurs this pretty scene. 
He had asked Sefchen to show him the executioner's 
sword, and as she brought it she sang gayly the grim 
lines from the old ballad : — 

" Say will you hang on the lofty tree, 
Or will you swim in the deep blue sea, 
Or will you kiss the naked sword 
Given us by the dear Lord 1 " 

And Heine answered with a lover's inspiration : — 

" I will not kiss the naked sword, 
I '11 kiss the ruddy Sefchen." 

" And since for fear of hurting me she could not 
resist, she had to let me put my arms around her 
waist and kiss her pouting lips. Yes, in spite of the 
executioner's sword, with which a hundred poor 
scoundrels had been beheaded, and in spite of the 
ill repute that any connection with that dishonored 
race involved, I kissed the executioner's pretty daugh- 
ter. I kissed her not merely out of tender inclina- 
tion, but also out of contempt for the old social order 
and all its dark prejudices; and in that moment there 
blazed up in me the first flames of two passions to 
which the rest of my life was dedicated : love for fair 
women, and love for the French Eevolution, — for that 
modern furor francese with which I was seized in 
the battle with the mercenaries of the Middle Ages," 
the reactionaries in politics and the Eomanticists in 
literature. To the inspiration of Sefchen he after- 
ward attributed the poems grouped under the title 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



331 



" Traumbilder," some of which are very weirdly 
beautiful. 1 She was, he says, his lover's purgatory 
before he fell into love's hell. 

With these feelings and memories, with the deep- 
est love for his mother Betty and his sister Charlotte, 
Heine left home at sixteen to begin his business 
career at Frankfort-on-the-Main, whence he soon 
went to Hamburg (1816), where he made an attempt 
to establish an independent business two years later. 
But for this, and indeed for Hamburg, he found no 
taste. " The men of this city," he writes to a friend, 
"are all Jews, Israelites and Christians together. 
As for the women, laughing Cupid shoots too low 
for them, and, instead of their hearts, usually hits 
their stomachs." Here first he felt the race preju- 
dice against the Jews, and also his own lack of sym- 
pathy with their commercial nature. And Hamburg 
brought him a still keener trouble in his hopeless 
love for his cousin Amalie, the rich banker Solomon's 
- daughter, the Molly of the exquisite verses of this 
period, whose memory burned in his heart, though 
her name is found but once in his correspondence, 
and that eleven years later. Long afterward in Paris, 
his friend the French poet Gerard de Nerval said 
of him: "A hopeless youthful love slumbers still in 
the heart of the poet. When he thinks of it, he may 
weep even now, or else he presses back his tears in 
rancor. Heine himself has confessed to me that, after 
he lost this loving paradise, love remained only a 

1 Especially "Ein Traura gar seltsam trauerlich," "Nun hast 
du das Kaufgeld," and " Was treibt und tobt mein tolles Blut." 



332 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



trade {metier) for him." It is certain that he gave 
himself up for a time to dissipation, and for this his 
frail constitution paid bitterly in after years. But it 
gave him no relief. Countless songs echo his pas- 
sion. In the " Traumbilder," in "Junge Leiden," in 
the " Lyric Intermezzo," even in " Heimkehr," many 
years later, and especially in the " Buch le Grand " 
of the " Pteisebilder," under all names and disguises, 
— Ottilie, Maria, Clara, Evelina, Agnes, Juliana, — 
his heart still throbs with Amalie's love. 1 

However much Heine might feel that his uncle had 
thwarted his affection, the young merchant was soon 
obliged to depend on the banker for material help. 
His own business venture failed in a crisis which 
cost his father also the greater part of his fortune, 
and it was decided that Heinrich should study law, 
at his uncle Solomon's expense, for three years. 
Thus the autumn of 1819 found him at the University 
of Bonn, whose examiners reported him as " ignorant 
of Greek, uncertain and unpractised in Latin, declin- 
ing examination in mathematics, not without all 
knowledge of history, and showing zeal, though mis- 
directed, in German composition," — surely no very 
brilliant start for a literary career. 

At Bonn, Heine came under the powerful influence 
of Professor Wilhelm Schlegel, who was, he says, 
" with the exception of Napoleon, the first great man 

1 Two ladies of the literary group called " Jungdeutschland," 
Zianitzra arid Dietz, have turned Heine's love into novels : " Hein- 
rich Heine, der Liederdichter " (1864), and "Heinrich Heines 
Erste Liebe" (1870). 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



333 



T had seen. I can still feel the holy thrill that went 
through my soul as I stood before his desk and heard 
him lecture." No doubt Heine was then perfectly 
honest in his admiration, though later he ridiculed it, 
and attacked Schlegel with much personal bitterness. 
To understand this apparent contradiction, it is well 
to consider at this point Heine's general relation to 
the Romantic School, though, in doing so it may be 
necessary to anticipate somewhat the story of his 
life. 

" The millennium of Romanticism has its end," 
says Heine in his " Romantische Schule," "and I 
myself was its abdicated fable-king. If I had not 
thrown the crown from my head and pulled on the 
workman's frock, they would certainly have beheaded 
me." But this ironical jest is hardly clear. 

If under the name Romantic we are to under- 
stand that opposition to classic form and culture that 
Goethe, and with him Schiller, had striven to intro- 
duce into German literature, then Heine, was not 
Romantic. If, on the other hand, we take Heine's 
own definition, that Romanticism stands for "the 
reawakening of the poetic spirit of the Middle Ages 
as it manifested itself in its songs, pictures, and 
buildings, in art and in life," we might say that he 
was really more Romantic than they who misunder- 
stood the oracle they proclaimed. Already in 1820 
he had written : " Christianity and Chivalry " in 
literature "are only means to free an entrance for 
Romanticism. Its flame has long been burning on 
the altar of our poetry, and no priest needs to pour 



334 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



holy oil on it, and no knight needs to watch his arms 
by it. Germany is free. No priest can longer im- 
prison German minds, no German princeling can 
longer scourge German bodies to forced labor, and so 
the German Muse should once more be a free bloom- 
ing unaffected German girl, and no ecstatic nun, 
and no knightly maiden proud of ancestry." The 
national democratic protest that lay in the Eomantic 
spirit was Heine's. In this sense he was a true and 
ardent patriot, but he was never a Chauvinist, as 
some of the chief Romanticists were proud to be. 

Again he says : " A witty Frenchman," Charles 
Nodier, " once called me a disfrocked Romanticist. I 
have a weakness for anything that shows wit, and, ill- 
natured as the name was, it pleased me very much. It 
hits the mark. In spite of my exterminating campaigns 
against Romanticism, I was always really Romantic, 
and more so than I myself guessed. After I had 
dealt mortal wounds to the taste for Romantic poetry 
in Germany, there came over me once more an endless 
lonains for the Blue Flower in the Romantic dream- 
land, and I seized the enchanted lute and sang a song," 
the romantic satire " Atta Troll," " in which I sur- 
rendered myself to all sweet exaggerations, all moon- 
shine intoxication, all blooming nightingale folly. I 
know it was the last free wood-song of Romanticism, 
and I am its last poet. With me the old lyric school 
of Germany is closed, while the modern German 
lyric begins with me. This double importance will 
he attributed to me by German literary historians." 
(Gestandnisse, viii. 9.) 



HEINPJCH HEINE. 



335 



Another characteristic that connects Heine with 
the Eomanticists is his irony. With him it is, indeed, 
far more Greek than with the Romantic revivers of 
this " greatest of all licenses, the divine impudence 
of persistent self-parody," or, as Solger has more philo- 
sophically defined it, " the pain which seizes us when 
we see the most glorious thing sink into nothing 
through a necessity of its own being." Of this irony 
Heine himself says that " while the artistic school of 
Goethe praise it as a peculiar glory of their master, 
it is really a sign of our political lack of freedom." 
But perhaps in his case it is more true to say that it 
sprang from the incompatibility of two elements in 
his nature, the Hellenic joy of life such as inspired 
Goethe's " Eoman Elegies," and the Hebrew earnest- 
ness nursed by the study of Hegel. Each, seemed by 
turns to show him the emptiness of the other. He 
never succeeded in establishing a harmony between 
those antinomies of his character. Hence came a 
mocking spirit to which very little was sacred, and 
which Heine possessed in a higher degree than any 
writer of the century. 

That Heine should have been Romantic in his youth 
was a natural result of his birth place and early train- 
ing. That school was then in its prime, and the 
Rhine country was precisely suited to cultivate the 
mediaeval spirit. Nor did he ever free himself en- 
tirely from the religious side of these traditions. 
The same tendency that brought many of the Roman- 
ticists to the Roman Church brought him late in life, 
not indeed to any church, but to a trustful deism. 



336 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Yet whatever affiliations he mistfit have with Bo- 
manticism he is right to assert that he gave it mortal 
wounds. " German Eomantic Poetry," says Schure', 
" was just celebrating her fairest days. A host of 
adorers pressed about her, each knight unfurled her 
colors in the race of literature and art. Kings smiled 
their applause, for the Romanticists strewed incense 
to them. Even diplomacy favored her, because she 
let the nations forget their thoughts of freedom. 
Then into the lists came a poet with brilliant fancy 
and sparkling wit, and proclaimed himself her most 
zealous knight. Unfortunately he discovered one 
day that he was breaking lances for a shrivelled old 
woman, instead of fighting for the charms of a bloom- 
ing beauty. Red with rage, he fluug his glove in her 
face, -and dealt such fierce blows to all her knights 
that most of them never rose again, and the lady her- 
self died of vexation. This undutiful son was Hein- 
rich Heine." 

While in Bonn, and under the influence of Schlegel 
and his disciples, Heine still wrote lyrics, and he was 
persuaded to attempt also a tragedy, " Almansor," but 
this was not finished when, that autumn, he exchanged 
Bonn for Gottingen, — a noted, though to him offen- 
sively aristocratic university, to which the opening 
paragraphs of the " Reisebilder " are an imperishable 
monument of satiric wit. Here more than ever he 
subordinated law to literature, but he had been only 
a few months in Gottingen when he was suspended 
for participation in a frustrated duel, and so he went 
to Berlin. 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



337 



In his letters from the Prussian capital the rather 
sentimental though cheerful tone betrays the Eo man- 
tic influence, and is in striking contrast to the sarcastic 
irony with which he treats that city eight years later 
in the " Eeisebilder." In Berlin he came directly 
under the influence of Hegel, who was then supreme 
in literary circles, and the metaphysician had a per- 
manent effect on the poet's mind, though he says 
that at the time he seldom understood him. Heine 
tells us, too, how one night he was standing with 
Hegel at a window, and in his poetic fancy called the 
stars the " home of the blessed." " Hm ! " said the 
philosopher, " stars ! Stars are only a bright eruption 
on the firmament." " What," said I, " is there then 
no happy spot where virtue is rewarded after death ? ' 
He glared at me with his pale eyes, and said, sneer- 
ing, " So you want a reward because you have sup- 
ported your sick mother and kept from poisoning 
your brother ? " In after years he recalled how that 
lecturer " sat like a brood hen on the fatal eggs (of 
atheism), and I heard his cackling." 

In Heine's immediate circle were several noted 
men, — Schleiermacher, Moser, Chamisso, Fouque', 
and the novelist Alexis, who used to unite in a cultus 
of Goethe at the house of the talented Varnhagen and 
his genial wife, Eahel Marcus. Their admiration for 
Goethe was no doubt more enthusiastic than discrimi- 
nating, but the close study of this master was of im- 
mense service to Heine, and can be traced in all his 
later work. When, however, in 1824, lie made the 
popular pilgrimage to Weimar, he was hurt at Goethe's 

22 



338 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



condescension to him. He evidently felt that he was 
not appreciated, as indeed he could hardly have been 
at that time, and in his correspondence he writes 
more harshly than he afterward thought just " of the 
man," he explains, " but never of the poet." 1 For 
whatever he may say against Goethe, no year passes 
without a tribute to that overshadowing genius. It 
was at the very time of his bitterest attack that he 
wrote the already cited words, "Nature wished to 
see how she looked, aud she created Goethe." Later 
he said : " Goethe with his clear Greek eye saw all 
in its true outlines and true colors, while we who 
were almost all sick were stuck far too deep in our 
morbid, disjointed, and romantic feelings, and could 
not see immediately how sound, unified, and plastic 
he showed himself in all his works." But of course 
Heine felt that he belonged to a new political era, 
and found little sympathy in the Olympian for his 
political aspirations. To Heine life was always a 
protest, first impatient and enthusiastic, then cynical 
and reckless, while Goethe was too far above social 
conventions to be irritated by them, and saw no gain 
to compensate him for political antagonisms. Thus 
Goethe roused in him the admiration of the poet 
and the indignation of the democrat, and this should 
explain the contradictions in Heine's expressed 
opinions of him. 

1 Especially in his review of Menzel's "Deutsche Litteratur." 
He did indeed say of Goethe's works that "they were barren, like 
all that is produced by art alone." But this was only a spiteful half- 
truth. 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



339 



It is interesting in this connection to recall Goethe's 
estimate of the young Heine. " It cannot be denied," 
he said to Eckermann, " that he has many brilliant 
qualities, but he lacks love. He loves his readers as 
little as his fellow poets and himself. ... In these 
last days I have read poems of his, and his rich 
talent is not to be denied ; but, as I said, he lacks 
love, and so he will never have the effect he should 
have had. Men will fear him, and he will be the 
god of those who would gladly be negative as he, but 
have not the talent." 

In Berlin Heine's literary genius blossomed under 
the sun of warm appreciation, and Eahel's friend- 
ship was a sustaining and refining power in his life. 
During 1820 he published unimportant letters in the 
Rhenish- Westphalian Advertiser, and at New Year 
he had succeeded in finding a publisher for a little 
volume of poems that had knocked in vain at such 
doors in Bonn and Leipzig. In this case the public 
showed better taste than their purveyors. The popu- 
larity of the book was immediate and great. For 
delicacy, fancy, condensation, originality, and depth 
of lyric expression, it was felt that a new power had 
risen in Germany. And yet not one of these youth- 
ful poems was light-hearted or joyful. Already it 
was said that he grasped the nature but not the pur- 
pose of poetry, already he was compared to Byron 
and to a fallen an^el. 

But even after this success he had still to seek a 
publisher for his dramas, and he found it a task that 
belonged " to the first stages of literary martyrdom." 



340 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



" One could not bear it but for the hope of being re- 
ceived into glory at the end." Not much glory, 
however, was to be hoped from the two tragedies, 
"Almansor" and " Eatcliff/' which with a "Lyric 
Intermezzo " 'composed this volume (1823). The 
poems indeed are still excellent, but " Almansor " is 
weak in diction, and " Eatcliff,'' though showing the 
influence of Scott, lacks smoothness, while both have 
the faults of the Romantic School. Heine seems to 
have been the only person who valued them highly, 
and they remained his sole dramatic efforts. In form 
the " Intermezzo " marks an advance on the earlier 
poems; ethically, however, it showed increasing bitter- 
ness, sinking sometimes to vituperation, and a reck- 
less boldness that rose at times to sensuality. Yet 
some of Heine's most perfect lyrics are here. 1 As 
for the reception of the book at home, Heine tells us 
his mother read it and did not like it, his sister toler- 
ated it, his brothers did not understand it, and his 
father did not read it at all. 

It was in this year (1823) that a visit to the North 
Sea brought him for the first time to the ocean, which 
then and later he learned to know and love as no 
other German poet has done. The poems of this 
time, grouped under the title " Heimkehr," with the 
later " Nord-See " cycle, are the finest verses of the 
sea that Germany has ever produced. They will 
bear comparison with the best work of Byron and 

1 For instance, " Tm wnnderschonen Monat Mai," " Ein Ficbten- 
baum stebt einsam," " Auf Fliigeln des Gesanges," and " Wenn icb 
in deine Angen seb'." 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



341 



Shelley in this field, and could merit no higher 
praise. 1 

The year 1824 brought him to Gottingen again, 
bent on legal studies, but led aside from them, as he 
complains, by the Library and the Eathskeller. " Love 
torments me, too, no longer the old, the single, but 
just as I am growing inclined to double-beer, I am 
getting inclined to double-love," as Richter called it. 
" I love the Venus de' Medici that stands here in the 
library, and I love the pretty cook of Counsellor 
Bauer. Alas ! I am unlucky with both." He was 
more fortunate in student duels, of which lie fought 
three and came off scathless. 

He was much perplexed at this time in regard to 
a change of religious confession. To practise law in 
Germany he must be a member of a Christian church. 
Baptism for this purpose was a pure form, and he 
alone of his family objected to it. As he approached 
the end of his studies the question grew urgent, and 
his inner conflict was reflected in " Der Rabbi von 
Bacharach," an unfinished story of great beauty which 
was written at this time. To be subjected to such a 
mockery could not fail to arouse bitter indignation in 
him, and so he was brought to sympathize w 7 ith the 
cause of his ancestors, though their faith had never 
been his own. He was' baptized in June, 1825, and 
took his legal degree in the next month ; but after all 

1 "Heimkehr" contains " Wir sassen am Fischerhause," "Der 
Mond ist aufgegangen," "Das Meer erglanzte," " Du schones 
Fischermadchen," as well as the famous " Lorelei," this last adapted 
from a ballad by Brentano. 



342 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



be never practised law. His act brought him no 
gain, and it is to his credit that he never attempted 
to palliate it. "I should be sorry/' he wrote to 
Moser, " if my being baptized should appear to you 
in a favorable light. I assure you if the law would 
have admitted stealing silver spoons instead, I would 
not have been baptized." He felt the act dishonor- 
able, though forced on him by the state, and it 
makes a melancholy close to his brilliant career as a 
university student. 

Meantime, however, he had completed the " Harz- 
reise," which w T as the fruit of a journey taken during 
his second stay in Gb'ttingen, and remains perhaps the 
best known of all his prose works. After receiving 
his degree he went again to the North Sea, and wrote 
a considerable part of " JSTordeney," afterward also in- 
corporated in the " Eeisebilder." He had still to go 
in search of a publisher; but im 1826 good fortune 
led him to Campe, of Hamburg, a literary man with 
whom he had many points of sympathy, who ex- 
ploited Heine's works to their mutual profit till the 
poet's death. 

Under Campe's auspices, the " Harzreise," with 
"Heimkehr," a group of songs, and some other poems, 
appeared in 1826. Heine, though he had twice re- 
vised it, was doubtful of its success, and even when un- 
deceived by the result, w 7 as not shaken in his opinion. 
But while critics criticised, they could not help admir- 
ing, and the general public were universally enthusias- 
tic over the genial pen-pictures of the Harz and the 
new chords in his poetry of the sea. The songs were 



HEINKICH HEINE. 



343 



almost immediately set to music and sung in every 
parlor. " People were amazed to see a poet who 
could to such a degree control, unite, and capriciously 
mingle poetry and prose, the popular and the artistic, 
the sentimental and the ironical, earnest and jest, 
melancholy and high spirits, the agreeable and the 
grewsome, fancy and reality, the tender and the 
strong.'' (Proelsz, 138.) None resisted the charm, it 
was something new in German literature, newer even 
than the lyrics. Such light, easy, sparkling prose, 
such graceful, daring, bubbling wit, had not yet been 
seen in Germany, and were to remain an unattained 
model for the imitation of following generations. 
Heine has never been equalled in this field save by 
himself, and he has not always maintained the level 
of the " Harzreise." 

The " Keisebilder " are not Pictures of Travel in 
an ordinary sense, nor, except in a secondary way, 
descriptions of the scenery of the Harz and the 
North Sea. The book opens with a satirical ac- 
count of Gottingen and of student life there. Then 
the writer tells of a learned disquisition he pro- 
poses to write, in mockery of the heavy German 
erudition of that day, on "The Feet of Gottingen 
Ladies." In Chapter I. he will deal of feet in gen- 
eral, in Chapter II. of the feet in classical antiquit} r . 
Chapter III. shall bring us to the feet of elephants, 
and IV. to the feet of the ladies of Gottingen. 
Chapter V. is to contain a digest of all that has been 
said about these feet in the students' beer-garden, 
and Chapter VI. shall treat them in their environ- 



344 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



merit. If he can find sheets large enough, he will 
add copperplate illustrations. He is never weary of 
laughing at Gottingen pedantry, and tells ns how one 
professor's son would not play with another because 
he did not know the accusative of mensa. By and 
by, as' he gets started on his journey, we hear more 
of the strange characters he meets by the way, of 
his dreams in country inns, of the poetry of nature, 
than we do of mountains and forests. The close, the 
most brilliant part of the whole, is a wonderful 
description of the Brocken, the highest peak of the 
Harz, of a student carouse in the inn there, and of 
his room-mate, (t who in his long brown wrapper 
looked like an emetic powder." The book ends 
with the descent from the Brocken, and the exqui- 
site idyl of the mountain brook, the Use and its 
Ilsenthal. 

The greater part of 1826 Heine spent in travel, 
with the ultimate intention of practising law in Paris. 
He visited Nordeney again, busy with the second part 
of " Nordsee," and with the autobiographical " Buch 
le Grand," which he said was to show " pure genuine 
humor"; but he was thirsting for battle, as we caji 
see from his letters, and the " Buch le Grand," with 
its revolutionary teaching and cultus of Napoleon, 
was calculated, as he saw, to give "both pleasure and 
anxiety " in Germany, so much so that he thought it 
safer to abide its publication in England (1827). 
" Something must be done in these hard, servile 
times," he writes. " I have done my part, and put to 
shame those hard-hearted friends who wanted to do 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



345 



so much and are silent now. When they are together 
and stand in rank and file, the most cowardly recruits 
are courageous, but he shows true courage who stands 
alone." And when he hears of the book's enthusi- 
astic reception, he exclaims with elation, " I have 
won an immense following. ... If I keep well, I 
can do much now, for I have a far-resounding voice. 
You shall hear it ofteu thundering against the jailers 
of ideas and suppressors of hallowed rights. I shall 
get a very ' extraordinary professorship ' in the uni- 
versity of high minds." 

The " Buch le Grand " was more read than talked 
or written about, for people feared the censorship and 
the police. It was speedily prohibited in Prussia, 
Austria, Hanover, and Mecklenberg. But that was 
not necessary to secure its circulation : it would have 
been read although it had not been forbidden. Even 
the praise of Napoleon was not resented by the Ger- 
man people, who felt that he was a tyrant of their 
own, a popular hero, sprung from the people, and the 
representative of the revolutionary liberties whose 
loss they still deplored. Critics might raise a warn- 
ing voice against the capricious disorder of the compo- 
sition, which borders on the Shandyesque. All that 
is true, but the book has in it a life that defies criti- 
cism, graceful, grotesque, cynical, naive, with a vigor, 
a brilliancy, a keenness of scorn, a fire of enthusiasm, 
that have seldom been surpassed, and make the book 
worth reading to-day, when all the direct interests 
that it represents are but dust and ashes of the 
past. - 



346 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



A quotation may serve at once as a specimen and 
as a defence of Heine's irony. He has been speaking 
of the familiar commonplace that all the world is a 
stage, on which tragedy and comedy are inextricably 
mingled. So " Aristophanes shows us the most aw- 
ful pictures of human madness in the mirror of wit, 
the great burden of the thinker who sees our noth- 
ingness (Faust) Goethe ventures to express only in 
the short couplets of the puppet-play, and the dead- 
liest lament over the misery of the world Shakspere 
lias put in the mouth of a fool who anxiously shakes 
the while his cap and bells. They have all learned 
it from the original Poet, who in the thousand acts 
of his world -tragedy knows how to push humor to 
the uttermost, as we see every day. After the exit 
of the hero come the clowns and the 'graciosos' 
with their fool-clubs and whips, after the bloody 
Eevolution scenes and Imperial acts come waddling 
on again the fat Bourbons, with their old W T orn-out 
jokes and pretty Legitimist puns, and the old noblesse 
skips gracefully up with its famished smile, its 
crosses, and its banners. . . . And the dear God 
reckons up that this theatre cannot hold out much 
longer, for one gets too much pay and another too 
little, and all play much too ill." " Strange," he says 
in another paragraph, " strange that the three greatest 
adversaries of the Emperor have already found an 
awful fate. Londonderry cut his throat, Louis 
XVIII. rotted on his throne, and Professor Saalfeld 
is still Professor in Gottingen." 

English liberty, and its great representative, Can- 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



347 



ning, had attracted Heine to London, but he did not 
love England nor the English. Wellington he 
describes as " a stupid ghost, with ash-gray soul, in 
a stiff linen body, with a wooden smile on an icy 
face." London he thought fit perhaps for a philoso- 
pher, but no town for a poet. " I might settle in 
England," he says in another place, " were it not that 
I should find there two things I cannot endure, 
coal-smoke and Englishmen." Indeed, "the ocean 
would have swallowed England long ago if he had 
not feared it would give him a nausea." What 
Heine disliked in that country was its narrowness, 
philistinism, and especially its hypocrisy and cant. 
He knew, of course, that he was unjust to a land 
where he had been warmly received, and did not 
mean his spleen to be taken seriously. He once 
made a brilliant and not unjust distinction between 
the races of Europe in their feeling for liberty. " An 
Englishman," he says, " loves liberty as he does his 
legal wife. She is a possession. He may not treat her 
with much tenderness, but he knows how to defend 
her. A Frenchman loves liberty like his affianced 
bride : he will do a thousand follies for her sake. 
A German loves liberty like his old grandmother. 
And yet . . . the surly Englishman may some day 
in ill temper put a rope round her neck, the incon- 
stant Frenchman may become unfaithful to his 
adored, . . . but the German will never quite aban- 
don his old grandmother; he will always keep for 
her a nook in the chimney-corner, where she can tell 
her fairy tales to the listening children." 



348 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



In September, 1827, Heine was again in Hamburg 
seeing through the press his collected lyrics, the now 
famous " Buch der Lieder," for which Campe re- 
ceived a fortune and he fifty louis d'or. November 
found him in Munich writing for the " Political 
Annals" of the noted publisher, Cotta. He hoped 
to get some government employment here or in Ber- 
lin, and did not scruple to suggest to Cotta that he 
should approach the king with the suggestion that 
his wit should be valued by its keenness, not by the 
good or bad use to which he had put it. But even if 
he was ready to sell himself, he was too dangerous 
a man to buy, and so, in July, 1828, he turned his 
disappointed face to Italy. 

His impressions of this journey are told after his 
peculiar manner in the " Baths of Lucca," the third 
part of the " Beisebilder." Sunny Italy suggested to 
him that the German summer was, after all, " only 
winter painted green, where the sun wore a flannel 
jacket to keep it from taking cold." The satire of 
this book is mainly directed against the relation of 
Jews to Christians in Germany, but he went out of 
his way to make a bitter personal attack on Count 
Platen, which made him rancorous enemies, and 
frightened even his friends, who could not but see 
that, from a moral, even more than from a literary 
standpoint, the book was inferior to its predecessors. 
"It was pronounced," says Sharp (p. 124), "the most 
brilliant, the wittiest, the most entertaining, the 
most immoral, the coarsest, the most dangerous, the 
most revolutionary, the most atheistical book that 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



349 



any German author had ever printed." It would be 
better to drop the superlatives in every case. Heine 
himself had been more brilliant, witty, and enter- 
taining. It would be easy to find others more coarse 
and more immoral. 

After the appearance of this book, Heine would 
not have been allowed to. live in Prussia, nor could 
he hope to live in peace anywhere. He had made 
influential men his mortal enemies, wantonly and 
with small excuse. Hamburg was disagreeable to 
him, and when lie was recalled from Italy by his 
father's death in the winter of 1828-29, he went, 
after a brief interval, to Helgoland, where he gave 
much time to serious study of Schiller and Goethe, 
and of the Bible. " What a book ! " he exclaims. 
" Great and wide as the world, with roots deep in the 
abyss of creation, and stretching up into the blue 
secrets of heaven." 

During this period he produced little, but the 
French Eevolution of 1830 roused him like a thunder- 
clap. "I know now once more what I will, ought, 
must. I am son of the Eevolution, and I seize once 
more the enchanted arms on which my mother spoke 
the spell. Flowers, flowers ! I will crown my head, 
and reach me, too, the lyre that I may sing a battle- 
song." But he had no serious disposition to fight 
with anything but his pen, for he was indeed but a 
" parlor demagogue." And so, when the reaction to 
the hopes of 1830 came in Germany with its sharper 
censorship, Heine's thoughts turned more and more to 
that fruitful mother of revolutions by the Seine, and 



350 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



May, 1831, found him in Paris, which remained his 
home for twenty-five years that brought him perhaps 
more fame, surely more suffering, than he had yet 
known. 

The poet's first years in Paris were filled with jour- 
nalism and feuds with German liberals. Into these 
political quarrels we need not enter. Heine's nature 
is full of enigmas. He seems always to have been 
patriotic in his way, but he was not a man of action. 
Besides, he was cosmopolitan in his sympathies, and 
soon felt as much at home in Paris as any stranger 
can feel in a foreign country. From the first, he 
enjoyed the society of the most distinguished men 
and women of literary France, among them Madame 
Eecamier, "the famous beauty of the Merovingian 
epoch " as he called her, the novelists Balzac, Dumas, 
Sand, the poet B^ranger, the critic Janin, the histo- 
rians Mignet and Thiers, the antiquarian Chevalier, 
and the musicians Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, and Meyer- 
beer. His journalistic work of this time is still inter- 
esting for its contemporary pictures of the men and 
times of the bourgeois king, but his political views 
were modified to suit his employers, a thing not alto- 
gether without excuse under the German censorship 
of the press. His real position, then and afterward, 
was moderately monarchical. He was not a repub- 
lican, and he had a dread of communism, for he felt 
it could hardly be warded off in the future. At this 
time, too, his old hatred of the aristocracy of birth 
was yielding to a stronger hatred of the plutocracy, as 
he saw it spreading its branches wide under the genial 



HEINKICH HEINE. 



351 



reign of Louis Philippe. However, in spite of all 
moderation, his letters were prohibited in nearly every 
German state. This was ultimately the fate also of 
the "Salon," his annual review of French art, which 
at that time was showing new activity and originality 
that Heine was first to proclaim and help to intro- 
duce in Germany. 

But the most significant product of his first French 
decade was "The Eomantic School" (1833), Heine's 
"most important work after the best of his songs. 
None of the later German historians has characterized 
the nature of German Eomanticism with more acute- 
ness or accuracy." 1 By it he hoped to correct what 
he thought unjust in Madame de StaeTs "Ger- 
many," and it was in France that it had its chief 
effect ; the more, as it too was immediately prohib- 
ited in most German states. But nothing that he 
had written was so effectual in establishing his fame 
in his new home. It opened to him the " Eevue des 
Deux Mondes," then a far greater power than to-day, 
and here he published a "History of Beligiou and 
Philosophy in Germany since Luther," which is 
among the most suggestive works on -the develop- 
ment of German thought, but mixed with so many 
allusions to present abuses that it could pass the 
German censorship only in a very mutilated con- 
dition. " Strange," he muses, " we Germans are the 
strongest and cleverest people. Our princely fami- 
lies sit on all the thrones of Europe, our Eothschilds 
govern all the exchanges of the world, our scientists 

1 Julian Schmidt, Geschichte tier deutschen Litteratur. 



352 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



rule in all sciences, we have invented powder and 
printing, and yet whoever fires a pistol with us pays 
three thalers fine, and if we want to put in the news- 
paper, 'My dear wife has a daughter, beautiful as 
liberty,' Dr. Hoffmann takes his red pencil and 
scratches out ' liberty.' " In the main, this book is 
an exposition of how Protestant theology had devel- 
oped into metaphysics, with a popular exposition of 
the fundamental ideas of Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, 
Schelling, and a few words about Hegel, to whom he 
expected to recur. He ends the book with a prophecy 
that, if free thought becomes real in Germany, the 
French will have more to fear from her " than from 
the whole Holy Alliance, with all their Croats and 
Cossacks." 

Meantime some satirical poems published in 1833, 
and the half autobiographical " Memoirs of Schna- 
belewopski," had brought on the poet a storm of rage 
from those who saw themselves held up to ridicule, 
and they replied with censure for the immoral life of 
the poet. Indeed, with all allowances and the benefit 
of every doubt, this censure was deserved. But in 
1834 his relation to Matilde, which, like Goethe's 
to Cbristiane, ended in marriage, and had been so 
regarded from the first, brought greater regularity 
into his life, though it is humiliating to think that 
he paid her aunt three thousand francs for persuading 
Matilde to the match, and that she knew it. Still 
Matilde was genuinely attached to him, and though 
her lack of culture, or even primary education, often 
annoyed him, — for she had small idea of his fame, 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



353 



and in early years perhaps never read a line of his 
poetry, — Heine grew much attached to the bright, 
cheerful woman who tended him through years of 
painful illness, and remained faithful to his memory 
through a long widowhood, for which he had made 
every exertion to provide. She died in 1883. 

Soon after this union financial embarrassments led 
Heine to seek and accept a secret pension from the 
French government, hardly a delicate thing for a 
foreign journalist, though he continued to criticise 
his patrons as freely as ever. The truth was dis- 
covered in 1848, and was bitterly remembered against 
him by less fortunate compatriots. 

The literary work of this, the least sympathetic 
period of Heine's life, may be briefly dismissed. A 
fragment of a novel, the "Florentine Nights," was 
followed by an essay in German mythology, now of 
value chiefly because it contained a popular song 
which was to be the starting point of Wagner's " Tann- 
hauser," as an allusion in " Schnabelewopski " had 
been of his " Flying Dutchman." Large projects of 
a great Continental newspaper and of sensational 
memoirs came to nothing. Yet the close of 1837 
found Heine, in spite of sickness, at the height of 
hope if not of fame, and indeed he might have had a 
peaceful and prosperous career before him had not 
that cynicism, the child of the irony he had nursed, 
made him more eager to make enemies than others 
are to make friends, more zealous for a cutting epi- 
gram than for sober truth. 

This appeared most glaringly in his essay (1840) 

23 



354 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

on his fellow-exile and compatriot, Borne, an eloquent 
journalist with whom he had had a feud of long 
standing. The reckless slander of this book, portions 
of which he was obliged publicly to withdraw, mark 
the lowest point in a moral decay that had been 
going on for ten years. But its unfounded accusations 
against a Madame Wohl brought him a duel, and 
this roused him to legalize his relation to Matilde 
by marriage, which was a much needed moral tonic, 
though he seized the occasion for a remark that shows 
how the cynical habit of mind gradually blights the 
tenderest relations. " This monster of a Madame 
Wohl," he said in his wife's presence to a friend, 
" has taken a cruel vengeance on me. I owe it to 
her that I am married, but I will avenge myself. 
When I left the church I made my will. My wife 
is universal legatee with the siugle condition that she 
marry again. I want to be sure that at least one 
man will mourn my loss daily. Why did that poor 
Heine die ? he will say. If he were still living I 
should not have his wife." In the political writings 
of this time one can see just this lack of genuineness. 
The work is perhaps as brilliant as ever, but it 
carries no conviction because it seems to contain 
none. 

Though in 1839 Heine, and perhaps his friends also, 
thought that his poetical period was passed, the spring 
was gathering for a new outburst, and in 1842 " Atta 
Troll," that " last wood-flower of the Komantic," was 
ready for the press, though it was not published till 
1847. He thought it the most important thing he 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



355 



had written. Under the thin disguise of the tale of 
a dancing bear who escapes to the Pyrenees, and is 
shot there/he satirizes German politics and politicians 
on the one hand, and the Eomantic School on the 
other. This mad "Midsummer Night's Dream" is 
too full of local allusions to be appreciated fully to- 
day, though enough remains intelligible to explain 
the universal excitement it caused. But of course it 
brought him more fear than love, and the poet was 
coming to a period in his life when a man values 
more the love than the dread of his fellows. 

In 1843, after twelve years of half voluntary exile, 
Heine made a brief visit to Germany for family 
reasons, and the next year there appeared a volume 
of " New Poems," and " Germany, a Winter's Tale," — 
" a romantic, political poem " he called it, " intended 
to show in the boldest, most personal way, the whole 
ferment of Germany to-day ; " but in reality it was a 
cynical account of his journey and its disillusions. 
The success of both was phenomenal, and indeed 
Heine had seldom done better work than those lyrics, 
nor written keener satire in the naturalistic vein than 
glitters in the " Winter's Tale." 

It was in this year (1844) that he began to suffer 
acutely with a disease of the eye that troubled him 
at intervals till the end, and led him to travel much 
in search of relief. Solomon Heine's death and the 
disgraceful meanness of his heir, whom Heine had 
nursed during the cholera plague at the risk of his 
life, intensified the nervous disorder. The vocal 
cords now began to be affected, and a disease of the 



356 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



spinal marrow made him a helpless invalid in all but 
his mind, which had still to endure ten years of puri- 
fying suffering. He indeed had no thought of such 
a lingering death. Already in 1846 he made his 
will, and wrote to his friend Lauhe that, if "he did 
not find him at No. 41, Faubourg Poisonniere, he 
should look for him in the Montmartre cemetery, — 
not Pere la Chaise,, which was too noisy to be agree- 
able." He had ceased to care for political life, and 
even the Eevolution of 1848 did not rouse him. 
" The Eepublic is nothing more than a change of 
name," he writes, " a revolutionary title. How could 
this corrupt, effeminate society change so quickly ? 
Paris, believe me, is for Napoleon, — I mean the gold 
Napoleon." And again he says, " I bow to fate be- 
cause I am too weak to face it; but I will not kiss 
her garment's hem." 

These years of patient suffering that close Heine's 
career give it a tragic element that wins back our 
sympathy for one whose reckless life had almost 
forfeited it. They show Heine in a nobler light than 
any in which he had yet appeared. He had never 
been strong, and early excesses had undermined his 
constitution. He had frequent warnings, but the 
witchery of Paris had drowned, time and again, the 
voice of prudence, and even now he could not regret 
the memory of those light-hearted days. " The 
happy consciousness that I have led a bright life," he 
writes in 1846, " fills my soul even in this wretched 
time." As one of his biographers has said, " He had 
striven to give the senses and the body like rights 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



357 



with the soul. Now it was to appear how high his 
soul rose above both." 

In the spring of 1848 Heine took his last walk in 
Paris. Half blind, lame, dragging himself along with 
the aid of a cane, a street riot drove him for ref- 
uge to the Louvre, and he found himself in the hall 
of the classical divinities. Suddenly there rose 
before him, with an overawing power which only 
those who have felt it know, the wonderful calm 
beauty of the Venus of Milo. " The goddess looked 
compassionately on me, but yet disconsolately, as 
though she would say, ' Dost thou not see that I 
have no arms, and cannot help thee ? ' " And from 
the Louvre he carried his sick heart to its long 
resting-place on his " mattress-tomb." 

Many friends have left us descriptions of these last 
years. Hillebrand, a somewhat noted writer of the next 
generation, who was with him during part of 1 849 and 
1850, says that he found him propped on mattresses on 
the floor, for it was long since he had been able to lie 
in a bed. His hearing was weak, his eyes closed, and to 
see he was obliged to hold up one of the lids with an 
emaciated finger. His legs were paralyzed, his body 
shrunken. Morphine alone quieted him. " In sleepless 
nights he composed his most beautiful songs. He dic- 
tated the whole of ' Eomancero ' to me. The poems 
were always ready in the morning, the polishing lasted 
hours." Hillebrand used to read to him, especially 
from the Bible and Goethe. " I am not become a 
pietist," he wrote to Campe, " but for all that I will 
not play with God. I will be honest with him as with 



358 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



men, and all in my papers that was still left of the 
old blasphemous period, the fairest poison-blossoms, 
I have torn out with firm hand. . . . When that 
crackled in the flames I felt strangely, I confess, . . . 
and beside me I heard the ironically comforting voice 
of some Mephistopheles who whispered to me, ' The 
dear God will pay you much better for that than 
Campe,' " the publisher. 

And yet up to the last there were times when the 
desire for revenge on those who had wronged him 
overcame him. " He would not die like a muzzled 
dog," he said, and once in the last month of his life, 
while writing his memoirs, Camille Selden relates 
that he burst out with a cruel laugh : " I have them. 
Dead or alive, they shall not escape me. Let who- 
ever has insulted me guard himself from these lines. 
Heine dies not like any beast. The claws of the 
tiger will outlive the tiger himself." 

Such flashes of the old spirit may be .pardoned the 
sufferer who had much to bear from mean-spirited 
relatives and false friends. The " Memoirs " had in- 
deed claws that too many were interested in sheath- 
ing, and the four volumes lie locked to this day in 
the Imperial Library at Vienna. But there was no 
lack of less dangerous humor. His wit, like Hood's, 
seemed exhaustless. " Pouvez-vous siffler t " asks the 
anxious doctor. That is, will your breath allow you 
to whistle, or, as the word may also be rendered, 
" hiss." Instantly the poet seizes the possibility and 
gasps, " Alas ! no, not even Scribe's plays." " My 
nerves," he said in 1855, " would take the first prize 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



359 



at the world's fair for pain and misery." He read 
medical books, " to qualify himself/' he said, " to 
lecture in heaven on the ignorance of doctors about 
diseases of the spinal marrow." Writing to a friend, 
he describes his state as " a grave without rest, death 
without the privileges of the departed, who need no 
longer spend money, nor write letters, nor make 
books. What a wretched condition ! " 

In the main there was now a deeper earnestness in 
his life, and in the Preface to the " Eomancero " 
(1851), he speaks frankly of his Christianity, though 
refusing to the last to be identified with any of the 
existing churches. " The misery of mankind is too 
great," he said. " When one lies on one's deathbed 
one gets very sensitive and impressionable, and wants 
to make peace with God and the world. Yes, I have 
returned to God, like the prodigal son, after tending 
swine with the Hegelians. Heavenly homesickness 
came over me and drove me forth through woods and 
ravines and over the dizziest mountain paths of 
dialectics." 

The " Eomancero " had a more rapid sale than any 
previous work of Heine, from eleven to twelve thou- 
sand being called for in two months. Such work 
would have been admirable under any circumstances. 
That these poems, so tender, so melodious, so ex- 
quisite in form and fancy, should be the product of 
the sleepless nights of a bedridden sufferer seemed 
almost beyond belief. Yet they showed no trace of 
failing power. To many critics they seem rather to 
mark the culmination of his lyrical genius. Here are 



360 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 

found the exquisite " Hebrew Melodies," in which, 
especially in "Jehuda ben Havely," the Biblical 
influence is very strongly marked. Here too is that 
noble ballad of Hastings Field, how the swan-necked 
Edith sought the body of her lord, King Harold ; 
here is that Marseillaise of German social democracy, 
the "Weaver's Song," which it is forbidden to sing in 
Germany to this day ; here, too, is the delicious ex- 
travaganza, " The White Elephant," and at the other 
extreme of the emotional scale, the " Lazarus Cycle," 
written under the shadow of impending death. 

Two miscellaneous volumes, headed by his " Con- 
fessions," appeared in 1854, and contained nothing to 
weaken his hold on the public. In France his fame 
was greater than ever ; but his heart was closing to 
literary ambition. He writes to Campe : " I am sick 
as a dog, and this great success which brings me 
daily enthusiastic visits and all that can flatter hu- 
man vanity cheers me little, and even increases my 
melancholy when I think how all this comes too late." 
" Often," he says in another place, " a doubt quivers 
through me whether a man really is a two-legged 
god, as Hegel told me twenty-five years ago. I am 
no more a divine biped. I am no more the high 
priest of the Germans after Goethe, no more the great 
heathen "No. 2, a Hellene of jovial life and portly 
person, laughing cheerfully down on dismal Naza- 
renes. I am only a poor death-sick Jew." 

When Meissner said to him of his last poems, that 
lie had never written anything like them, he lifted 
his eyelid with his bloodless hand and said : " Yes, 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



361 



yes, I know it. That is beautiful, horribly beautiful. 
That is a lament as though from a grave ; it seems 
there as though a man that had been buried alive 
were wandering through the night, or perhaps a 
corpse, or the grave itself. German poetry has never 
heard such tones, and never could hear them, for no 
poet has ever yet been in such a case." These 
Lazarus songs are as unique in German as " Kubla 
Khan " in English ; weird visions of strange beauty, 
or of horror, torment, and awe, come to us with the 
vividness of reality that make them terrible. But 
beside those notes of mortal agony, the old irony 
peers out now and again, and even the sportive grace 
of the " Buch der Lieder" has not wholly deserted 
him. Heine was never so many-sided as now, never 
had he shown such complete mastery of literary 
genius that could give every mood its fit poetic 
expression. 

He continued to work as long as he could hear and 
speak. Even in 1855 he would compose five or six 
hours a day, beside revising wbat had been done. 
Many friends still cheered him with their visits, 
among them, after 1855, the youthful and talented 
adventuress, Camille Selden, who lives as La Mouche 
in some of his latest verses ; and Caroline Jaubert, 
his "little fairy," whose motherly care was very 
precious to him, for their friendship was constant 
and never troubled by any suggestion of a nearer 
relation. 1 But his wife, Matilde, was his first and 

1 Heine's best poems to Camille Selden begin thus : " Es tranmte 
mir von einer Sommernacht," " Dich fesselt mein GeJankenbahn," 



362 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



constant thought. For her he labored on that she 
might not want after his death anything that he 
could give her. And it is pleasant to think that 
these last wishes were fulfilled. 1 

On the 13th of February, 1856, he composed for 
six hours. They begged him to spare himself. " I 
have still four days' labor, then my work is done," he 
answered. But he never wrote more. On the 16th 
he asked faintly for " paper and pencil." These were 
his last words. 2 On the 17th he died. He was 
buried quietly on the 20th, in the cemetery of Mont- 
martre, without religious services. Matilde claimed 
the right to erect his simple monument. 

It has been said of Heine that he was "the repre- 
sentative of a skeptical time of ferment." Perhaps 
it would be better to say " the skeptical representative 
of a time of ferment." Various critics have variously 
compared him, endeavoring to fix his elusive genius 
by coupling it withjone more easily grasped. Thus 
he figures as the German counterpart of the Greek 
Aristophanes, of the Latin Catullus, of the Spaniard 

" Lass mich mit gliihnden Zangen kneipen," " Worte, Worte, keine 
Thaten," " Wahrhaftig wir beide bilden." She has contributed 
to his memory, " Les Derniers Jours de H. Heine," Paris, 1884. 
Madame Jaubert lived till 1884 in Paris. 

1 Matilde received 28,000 francs in cash and a pension of 8,250 
francs annually. In return she suppressed the "Memoirs." Heine's 
best poems to her are : " An die Engel," " Babylonische Sorgen," 
and " Ich war, O Lamm, als Hirt bestellt." 

2 Some say he had still strength to gasp to an officious friend who 
besought him to make a formal peace with Heaven, " Dieu me par- 
donnera, c'est son metier." The story lacks evidence. 



HEINRICH HEINE. 



363 



Cervantes, of the English Sterne, Swift, Byron, and 
Shelley, of the Scot Burns, and of the French Eabe- 
lais, Villon, Voltaire, and Beranger. Others have 
grouped him with Jean Paul. But the very variety 
of comparison only illustrates the hopelessness of the 
task. And we cannot think that even he himself 
rightly comprehended himself when he doubts if a 
laurel wreath should lie on his coffin, but asks that 
a sword be placed there because " he was a brave 
soldier in humanity's War of Liberation." 

It is not so that we think of him to-day, but rather 
as he who transferred to a political and social field 
the activity of Goethe in a literary one, who in an 
age of democratic upheaval saw more clearly than 
any other the hollowness of inherited social condi- 
tions, though he could not solve the problem of the 
future. Heine was essentially a realist. He painted 
life as he saw it, and he conceded, as he grew older, 
less and less to romantic imagination. He bore the 
banner of revolutionary reform, but he was never its 
blind partisan. Of all German writers, of whatever 
period, he is most completely in touch with the rest- 
less, questioning, dissatisfied spirit of the present day, 
a spirit that has lost its old ethical moorings, and has 
found as yet no new anchorage. Therefore men read 
him with sympathy. He is the wittiest, clearest, 
keenest satirist, the most delicate and graceful writer 
of songs in Germany. Therefore men read him with 
delight. Less positive than Goethe, he has not the 
peculiar quality that makes a classic for all ages and 
peoples, and yet, as Matthew Arnold says, he is " in- 



364 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



comparably the most important figure of that quarter 
of a century that follows the death of Goethe." 

" The spirit of the world, 
Beholding the absurdity of men, 
Their vaunts, their feats, let a sardonic smile 
For one brief moment wander o'er his lips, 
That smile was Heine." — M. Arnold. 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 365 



CHAPTER XI. 

IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 1 

It is interesting to note how, in every one of the 
great languages of Europe, the novel is coming to 
take the foremost place in imaginative literature. 
This is as true of France and England as of Germany. 
If we ask ourselves who were the representative 
writers of Elizabeth's day, or of Anne's, or of the 
Georges', the larger part of the names that rise to our 
minds will be poets. In our own day, the men of cor- 
responding position are the novelists. Even Tennyson 
and the Brownings, Longfellow, and Lowell as a poet, 
seem to belong to a receding generation. And so 
in France, the men who made famous the age of 
Louis XIV. were the poets, while to-day prose is the 
favorite vehicle of literary expression. In Germany, 
Heine is the last of the great poets, and the novelists 
have come to claim almost the entire field of imagi- 
native literature. By their number more perhaps 
than by their merit they tend to drown all other 
voices. The annual production of novels in Germany 
appears, from Kiirschner's " Litteraturlexikon," to be 

1 A portion of this chapter has appeared in "The Sewanee 
Review " for May, 1894. 



366 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



about twelve hundred, and to them we may probably 
add at least six thousand short stories. Of these, 
by far the greater part are of course wholly ephem- 
eral. It is to the few writers whose work marks 
progress, development, or at least change, in the art 
and aim of fiction that I wish to direct attention 
here, with but brief allusion to the other forms of 
pure literature. 

The sources of modem German fiction need not 
be traced beyond Wieland and the literary circle of 
Weimar. For their whole imaginative literature 
stands in essential relation to the French Eevolution 
as the immediate source of the social problems of 
our day. It is first with Wieland that the German 
novelist becomes a social philosopher, who seeks the 
key to living vital questions. He is, to be sure, a 
laughing philosopher, an Epicurean pococurante; 
but yet he brought fiction back to the psychological 
and philosophical basis that had made the glory of 
Wolfram von Eschenbach. 

Goethe accepted his standpoint and bettered his 
instruction. By his analysis of character, he opened 
a boundless field to the novelists of the future. Keen 
insight and fearless opposition to prejudices, moral or 
social, in " Werther " and " Wilhelm Meister," and the 
remarkable perfection of form in the " Elective Affini- 
ties," had an influence on fiction that can be traced 
for at least two generations, while in Schlegel's 
"Lucinde"we have the troubled source of a turbid 
stream of novels that preach woman's rights and 
social reform generally. But the " Lucinde " and the 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 367 



" Elective Affinities " are the only novels of the earlier 
period whose influence can be traced after 1850. 

For the generation that was in its prime when our 
half-century began had been occupied with political 
life as few in Germany had ever been. The years 
between the French Ee volutions of 1830 and 1848 
had been a period of intense fermentation beyond the 
Ehine also. That was no time for the pretty fancies 
of the Eomanticists, — for Blue Flowers and Water 
Fairies. It was a time of serious problems, — the 
critical point of the struggle between the old feudal 
constitution of German society and the new democ- 
racy, between aristocracy and industrialism, — the 
age of popular journalism in Germany, of the railway 
and the steamboat. The year 1848 not only marks 
the dividing line in politics, but draws it as distinctly 
between the old literature and the new. 

" Young Germany " was full of energy and zeal ; 
they were reformers, revolutionists rather, bent on 
destroying all barriers to social freedom, or, as it has 
been epigram matically called, " the emancipation of 
the flesh." At their head was Gutzkow, and one of 
his first stories bore the significant title, " Walty, the 
Female Skeptic." It earned its author fame, and 
what was then the added honor of three months' im- 
prisonment, and it had many fellows in its attack on 
the existing social order, more bold than wise, but 
voicing very clearly the impending democratic up- 
heaval. Among these, two youthful works of Luise 
Muhlbach, " The Pupil of Nature " and " The Pupil 
of Society," deserve special notice. Literary Ger- 



363 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



many was now in closest touch with France. Sand, 
Sue, and Dumas, following in the steps of Eousseau, 
were studying modern life with the same sympathy 
that these Germans were showing for the lowest social 
strata, and both found in severity to the aristocracy 
a key to popular favor. Thus for the first time in its 
history the German novel came to have the actuality 
and living reality of a political pamphlet. In their 
hands it grew to be what it has ever since remained, 
one of the most effective forms of social and political 
propagandism in Germany. For this purpose, it took, 
and still takes, its subjects from very recent history. 
The true historical novel was not developed till 
some years later, as these enthusiastic reformers 
grew older and cooler. The best work of this kind 
that "Young Germany" produced, Laube's "Der 
Deutsche Krieg," a story of the Thirty Years' War, 
was not written till 1863-65. 

Meantime, outside of this immediately political 
sphere, the gospel of " emancipation," first preached 
in the "Lucinde," and ably seconded by Johanna 
Schopenhauer, mother of the pessimistic philosopher, 
had its natural result in the multiplying of female 
novelists, which is a characteristic sign of this time. 
Beside Muhlbach and the sane and moderate Lewald 
appear the radical Luise Ashton, the mildly polyga- 
mous Ida Frick and Ida Hahn-Hahn, whose genial 
theory seems to be that a woman whose heart is large 
enough for two ought not to be content with one. 
Even the mild and gentle Marlitt does not always 
hide her emancipationist birthmark. 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 369 

Marriage is of course the subject dear to these 
feminine hearts. Fanny Lewald has turned it in 
every , direction, and looked at it from every side. 
After forty-five years, she decided that practice was 
better than speculation. She married Professor 
Stahr (1885), and the subject lost its interest for 
her. Other women, too, grow far less radical in this 
matter, and Wilhelmine von Hillern has actually 
satirized blue-stockings and all their ways in "Der 
Arzt der Seele" (1869). 

In style, the novels of " Young Germany " showed 
growing delicacy in detail-painting and increasing 
clearness in form and language, which may be 
ascribed to the stimulus and example of Goethe's 
" Elective Affinities." In their general tendency an 
independent nationalism asserts itself with growing 
confidence, — a confidence that is never lost, even in 
the dreary reaction that followed the premature out- 
burst of 1848. 

This reaction, however, turned fiction for a time 
from the political to the purely literary field. Ceasing 
perforce to preach, it strove to entertain, and even 
aspired to cultivate. These were the palmy days of 
"Die Gartenlaube" and other unpolitical and gen- 
erally " harmless " journals. But the novelists were 
still almost wholly from the liberal school in poli- 
tics, and strongly influenced by the scientific devel- 
opment of the age and the theory of evolution 
Under this guise, the novel became more respect- 
able, more fit for the parlor table, and found a widen- 
ing circle of readers ; and thus we are brought to our 

24 



370 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



own time, where it will be convenient to distinguish 
historical fiction from novels that deal with contem- 
porary life, which themselves invite subdivision, as 
will appear presently. 

The modern historical school of fiction begins with 
Karl Spindler and Willibald Alexis, who used his- 
tory in a time of national humiliation to strengthen 
and deepen the patriotic spirit. 1 Equally national 
and more artistic is SchefTel's "Ekkehard" (1855), 
which the universal voice has already raised to the 
rank of a classic. 2 Here thorough study joins with 
genial fancy and hearty humor to present a charming 
picture of courtly and monastic life in mediaeval 
Germany. Many of its characters and scenes are 
part and parcel of the popular literary consciousness, 
and familiar to those who have never read the rather 
bulky volume. It is a story of the tenth century, 
and the hero is a monk of St. Gall, teacher of Duch- 
ess Hedwig of Swabia, who discovers too late their 
mutual love when his obtuseness has roused her 
wrath and caused his exile. Without any pretence 
of learning, SchefTel has drawn a wonderfully fresh 
and bright picture of the period when German society 
was crystallizing, and the simplicity of the style well 
suits an age when the world was young. The humor 
has a childlike gaiety very different from the sar- 
casm and irony that tinges the later humorists of 
the century. This was SchefTel's only important 

1 For instance, " Isegrimm " and " Ruhe ist die erste Pflicht." 

2 Its sale (a hundred and ten thousand) far exceeds that of any 
other German novel. 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850 371 



novel, but he was author also of "Juniperus" 
(1866), a tale of the Crusades, and of the famous 
story in verse of the "Trumpeter of Sakkingen" 
(1854), once student of law, then wandering musi- 
cian, and at last Papal band-master, — a story told 
with more verve and bubbling humor than was com- 
mon in Germany then or is now. 1 

In Scheffel the German spirit was deep and strong. 
Professor Ebers brings us to the sphere of purely anti- 
quarian interests. His novels have so little of the 
distinctively Germanic that they are almost as widely 
read in America as at home. Most of them have 
Old Egypt for their scene, and their attraction lies in 
the curiosity that this new-old world naturally 
excites even in the half cultured. His style is charm- 
ing, his plots well managed, but he fails in the 
development of characters, which after all in their 
thoughts and motives are thoroughly modern. So, 
as Franz Hirsch has observed, if one were to transfer 
these novels from Egypt to modern times, and give 
these " four o'clock tea " Egyptians modern costumes, 
one would soon see how dry, unreal, weak, and poor, 
how artificial in sentiment, how lacking in all poetic 
freshness, this so-called fiction is in its nature. In 
Ebers there is learning, as we might expect from a 
German professor. Learning builds for him an 
antique stage, perfect in every detail ; but here his 
imagination fails, and modern actors tread the ancient 

1 This poem has been translated into English by Mrs. Briinnow 
(1877). Another translation, with an introduction by Theodore 
Martin, appeared in 1893. 



372 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



boards. 1 Much the same may be said of the clas- 
sical novels of Eckstein, whose titles, "Aphrodite" 
(1885), " Nero " (1889), " Prusias " (1887), " Die Clau- 
dier" (1881), sufficiently indicate their subjects; and 
Hamerling's "Aspasia" (1876), is also an unfortunate 
error in the same direction of an otherwise talented 
author. 

A much higher place in this field must be accorded 
to Felix Dahn, who gives himself also a more sym- 
pathetic task, for he takes the German migration as 
his theme, and" so strikes a chord that is sure to 
stir the German heart. His " Kampf urn Eom " 
(1876) has a breadth and a swing that make it kin to 
the old popular epic, and give it a very high artistic 
unity. Indeed, this is one of the greatest historical 
novels of any country. Here we may watch Ger- 
manic virtues softened by the culture of the South, 
and falling at last a prey to its devious and unscru- 
pulous diplomacy. The writer has chosen a generous 
canvas, but, though the tale fills four volumes, the 
interest never flags. Rather one feels a growing- 
regret as one sees fatally impending the tragic 
close of the story and of the kingdom of the 
Ostrogoths. 

In these dark ages when history is obscure, a 
freer scope may be claimed for the fancy of the nov- 
elist. Certainly Dahn has given his characters a 
wonderful reality. No German but feels that they 
are of his race, and his pulses beat quicker in sym- 

1 Vischer, in his novel "Aueh Einer," has inserted a delightful 
parody of this antiquarian fiction. 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 



373 



pathy with a people whose democratic virtues were 
the causes of their fall. The mass of learning that 
this book involves is immense, but it is carried so 
lightly that only the specialist realizes with what 
care each detail of art, language, mythology, and 
antiquity is wrought into a perfect picture of the 
times. The Gothic princes, Theodoric, Totila, Wiligis, 
and Tela, are strongly drawn, while Amalaswintha 
rises, in her fearful vengeance, to the height of an 
ancient epic heroine. Cethegus, the old Roman, pre- 
fect, republican, despot, and demon, is, like Narses 
and Belisarius, rather a personification than a char- 
acter ; but the Emperor Justinian and his wife, the 
quondam circus dancer Theodora, are clearly con- 
ceived and sharply characterized. This is by far the 
greatest work of Dahn ; but his shorter stories of the 
migration, though in lighter vein, have value both as 
side-lights to history and as poetic creations. The 
invasion of the Huns becomes more real by his 
"Attila"(1888). " Bissula " (1884) and "Felicitas" 
(1883) vivify and clarify our ideas of the relation 
of German and Eoman culture along the Ehine as 
the empire was nodding to its fall. Not even Thierry 
had made the Merovingians so real as Dahn's " Fre- 
digunde " (1885), that queen who lives still in French 
song as " the fair, the blond, the terrible." 

The only compeer of Dahn in national fiction is 
Freytag, who had already earned a good report in 
the drama and in the romance of modern life, and 
had approved himself, in his " Pictures from the 
German Past " (1859-1862), a deep student of an- 



374 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



tiquity and a master of composition. He was past 
middle life, already fifty-six, when he undertook, in 
a series of seven volumes, to erect a monument to 
the continuity of German character through all ages 
of its history. Eight years of his maturest talent 
were devoted to the work, which is already a classic 
in German literature. "Die Ahnen " (1872-1880), 
"The Ancestors," is wider in scope, more national 
in character, though perhaps less vivid in execution, 
than the work of Dahn. First, " Ingo " reaches back, 
with epic simplicity, into the twilight of German 
history ; then " Ingraban " brings us to the Chris- 
tian conversion and to our own St. Boniface. In 
both, the epic style rises to rhythm, and frequently 
to alliteration, so that form aids language in conjur- 
ing up these ancient scenes, which reach at times a 
tragic grandeur that recalls the fate of the Nibelun- 
gen. A third novel shows the Roman Church begin- 
ning to predominate in German culture; another 
tells of the Teutonic knights, and their struggle with 
Prussian heathendom. In " Marcus Konig " we 
come to the Reformation and the founding of the 
Prussian State. The concluding parts deal with the 
Thirty Years' War, the development of Prussia under 
Frederic William L, and the revival of national life 
after the humiliations of Napoleon. All is infused 
with a genuine patriotic spirit that knows no other 
limits than the German race. Few novelists have 
had so wide and lofty a conception of their vocation 
as Freytag and Dahn. Contemporary literature 
shows nothing like it. Nor is the reason hard to 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 375 



see. No .other nation in Europe, in the last half- 
century, has had its national pride so stirred, and its 
national consciousness so exalted, as Germany since 
1866. In literature, ad in history, the hour brings 
the man. 

The conditions that fostered the talent of Freytag 
and Dalm naturally induced imitators, and inspired 
also men of independent though inferior genius. 
Among these Konrad Ferdinand Meyer is worthy of 
special study. It is peculiarly instructive to con- 
trast the French tendencies of this author before 
1870 with the thoroughly Germanic spirit of his 
later work ; for though Meyer was a Swiss by birth 
and residence, the glories of his race roused in him 
also a patriotic glow, that infuses his " Jiirg Jenatsch " 
(1876), "Thomas Becket" (1880), and "Die Ver- 
suchung von Peskara," which deal with the Thirty 
Years' War, the struggle of Church and State in the 
middle ages, and the fateful connection of Italy with 
the mediaeval empire. These and his more recent 
"Lucretia Borgia" (1891) show at once a keen psy- 
chological analysis and careful historical study. His 
" Hochzeit des Monchs " (1884) is one of the most 
powerful short stories in German, while "Hiittens 
Letzte Tage " (1871) is a direct and eloquent poetic 
expression of the German triumphs of 1870. To 
this inspiration may be ascribed also Gottschali's " Im 
Banne des Schwarzen Adlers" (1876), a novel of the 
times of Frederic II. ; and the list could be greatly 
extended. 

In the second division of fiction, the study of 



376 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



modern life, if we go back to the reaction that fol- 
lowed the nipping of the aspirations of " Young Ger- 
many," in 1849, we shall find the writers still liberal 
in politics, and bent, though with greater moderation, 
on social and moral propagandise. Under these con- 
ditions imaginative work of the first order was not 
likely to be produced, and it is probably correct to say 
that the first novel since 1850 that is still read by 
any but students of literature, is Freytag's " Soil und 
Haben " (1855). This, too, is political in tendency ; 
but it has raised the question to a higher plane, and has 
struck the key-note of the fiction of the generation. 
This key-note is the inevitable conflict between the 
industrial, democratic spirit of the age and the spirit 
of caste and privilege rooted in the feudal past and 
little shaken in Germany even by the French Eevo- 
lution, — an inevitable conflict, with right and wrong 
on both sides, but with forces apparently so unequal 
that it might well seem necessary, in the words of 
Freytag's preface, " to rouse the people from their dis- 
couragement and show them a picture of their own 
worthiness." So here, as later in "Die Ahnen" he 
was inspired with a wise patriotism and able to aid 
effectively in the moral development of his nation. 
He preaches the gospel of honest industry. The 
great commercial house of Schroter, with its patri- 
archal government, with industry and honesty infus- 
ing energy in every part, " where work is pleasure," 
was something new in German fiction. The aris- 
tocracy, in its virtues and its weakness, is shown 
to be the nidus of the commercial Jews who prey 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 377 



upon it, and the moral is that the nobility can main- 
tain itself only by adopting, with its representa- 
tive Fink, the virtues of the industrial class. But 
though " Soil und Haben " was once a gospel of 
democracy, to-day the book seems to belong to the 
past. The industrialism that it preached is an ac- 
complished fact, and while it is still interesting, the 
novel has not the actuality that once made it a 
power. 

For " Soli und Haben " was the beginning of a 
new epoch in fiction. Not as though the Eomantic 
School had ceased to have its representatives, who still 
paraded mock pathos to the half-cultured. Keller 
and his " Grliner Heinrich" (1854) found no lack of 
popularity for its mystical maunderings, and the 
ranks of his admirers still endeavor to atone for their 
thinness by their enthusiasm. 1 But this can be re- 
garded only as a perverse eddy in the critical current. 
Keller was not himself a German by birth or instinct. 
His stories are, from first to last, distinctively Swiss 
in tone and feeling. In this regard there is little 
to choose between the first part of the " Leute von 
Selclwyla," published in 1856, and the second, is- 
sued twenty years later. " Martin Salander," his last 
novel, is as intensely local as the " Ziiricher Novel- 
len " or the " Sieben Legenden." 

Another belated blossom of the Eomantic is Storm, 
a Holsteiner, who died in 1888, and deserves a better 
fate than has befallen him in America, where he is 

1 Schonbach, Ueber Lesen und Bildung, 99-110, speaks for this 
group with more emphasis than discretion. 



378 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



mainly known as the author of " Immensee," a maw- 
kish tale, and quite inferior to the " Aquis Submersus," 
or " Der Sehimmelreiter," which are good at least in 
local color, though rather exaggerated in sentiment. 
And there are several other men who carry on the 
Eomantic tradition. But in the main the growing 

O CD 

sternness has brushed these survivals aside. Neither 
they nor those who enjoy them are in touch with the 
spirit of to-day. This has been true ever since, in 
the sixties, it began to grow clear that the hour of 
political reckoning was not far off, and the intenser 
tension was immediately reflected in the sensitive 
barometer of fiction, to which Spielhagen's " Proble- 
matische Naturen " served as the significant index. 

Here, as in his earlier ventures, Spielhagen showed 
himself a close student of Goethe. The very title is 
from the "Elective Affinities." The subject is the 
same irrepressible conflict between the stolid landed 
nobility and the misguided intelligence of the nation, 
culminating in the catastrophe of 1849. These stories 
show how fiction during the sixties begins to get 
more in touch with popular feeling, following it step 
by step in its aspirations and its hopes ; for Spiel- 
hagen has always a cheerful confidence in the future, 
not shared by his contemporaries, Meissner and 
Hopfen. The aim of these novels, like that of the 
people for whom they were written, was, however, 
not always clear or decided. It is curious to note 
how, in this decade, Auerbach's " Auf der Hb'he " 
(1865) and "Das Landhaus am Ehein " (1867), in 
contrast to " Barfiissle " and the harmless " Village 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 379 



Tales" (1843 seq.) of his earlier maimer, illustrate 
this same tendency in their attempted solution of 
social problems by the acid uf Spinoza's philoso- 
phy. They are graceful, but a winter's chill runs 
through all. 

But soon the progress of politics gave a new im- 
pulse to German energies. War with Denmark was 
followed close by the great victory over Austria in 
1866 and the dazzling triumphs of 1870. The Ger- 
man empire was once more a reality, not the simula- 
crum that Napoleon had laid forever to rest in 1806, 
but such as it was in Barbarossa's day, a great, per- 
haps the greatest power in Europe. 

The effect on the historical novel of this crisis of 
the world was transforming ; on the novel of modern 
life it was less apparent ; for the empire, while it lifted 
the political cloud, did not solve the social problems, 
which rather became the more acute as thought was 
more concentrated on them. Pessimism, the prevail- 
ing philosophy of the sixties, continues still to color 
the treatment of modern life. In Germany, as in 
France, the tendency is to lay bare life's seamy side, 
to deal with the diseased, the deformed, the excep- 
tional. This tends to bring into the foreground a 
new factor, the religious, beside the political and the 
social. In Germany and in England the religious 
novel, or at least religion in the novel, begins to find 
a place, and there, as here, the attitude is, as it was 
in the political and social field, " liberal," that is, 
opposed to traditional Christianity. The leaders of 
thought in this field are Schopenhauer and Strauss ; 



380 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



the head of the new school of fiction is Paul Heyse, 
distinguished also as a critic, poet, and dramatist. 

The first great novel of Heyse dates from 1873. 
"Children of the World" is its significant title, its 
contents pessimistic philosophy applied to every 
sphere of social life except the political. The divorce 
of religion and morality is its moral, the overthrow 
of the church establishment in Prussia its immediate 
purpose. This may not promise much to the Ameri- 
can and probably Christian reader ; but yet the book, 
in spite of what Bleibtreu calls its " sensuous senti- 
mentality and sentimental sensuousness," where the 
author, " in a dress-coat promenades gracefully with 
sin," 1 in spite of its alleged " creeping poison," is of 
great talent and intense interest, — a work that would 
disown " Eobert Elsmere " even for a weak and erring 
brother. Less powerful, but more delightful, than 
this novel is "Im Paradiese " (1875), a story of artist 
life in Munich. Its fundamental theory is much the 
same, however. Marriage is the theme, the thesis 
that freedom is permissible to the aristocracy of 
genius. The hero's unhappiness comes from his 
marriage, the cure from an artistic attachment ; and 
that divorce and a second marriage restore all to the 
legal basis is, as Heyse expressly tells us, only a con- 
cession to formality. Of such "concessions" the 
whole book is full. The bulwarks of bourgeois 
morality are never directly attacked, but they are 
silently undermined in each of the four artist mar- 
riages that close the story. One cannot leave it, how- 

1 Bleibtreu, "Revolution in der Litteratur " (1887), p. 25. 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 381 



ever, without bearing witness to the fresh beauty of 
its style and the graceful lightness of its movement, 
things rather rare in this school of fiction. But 
Heyse is perhaps best known by his short stones, 
which hold much the same place in Germany that 
Maupassant's do in Trance, — models in their kind, 
masterpieces of form, cameos cut with a firm hand, 
leaving an impression on the mind where every line 
tells. 

Heyse's " Tin Paradiese " naturally leads one to 
speak of Wilbrandt's "Hermann Ifinger" (1892), 
one of the most thoughtful novels of recent years, 
whose early scenes are laid in the artistic circles of 
Munich, though the story closes in Vienna. Both in 
its ethics and in its aesthetics this story breathes a 
healthy conservatism that is peculiarly refreshing and 
true to the best that is in German character, a clear 
vision of duty and an unswerving will. The book is 
one of the few of recent years that is strong and yet 
hopeful. 

Less artistic, more rigidly modern, more closely 
affiliated to the French " naturalists," is Paul Lindau, 
who with Mauthner and Eing makes a specialty of 
dissecting low Berlin life, while Fontane and Heiberg 
show a more sympathetic study of the local types of 
the German capital. 1 These suggest Dickens's Lon- 
don sketches ; but the former draw discouraging pic- 
tures that are not pleasant reading. Take, for instance, 
Lindau's "Arme Madchen " (1887) where the poor 

1 E. g., "Frail Jenny Treibel" (1892) and " Die Familie von 
Stiegritz" (1893). 



382 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



but honest girl struggles to preserve her repute and 
purity amid surroundings that drag her down, hin- 
dered by poverty from the marriage of her choice, and 
cutting at last the knot of her existence by suicide, 
quite in the old Werther fashion ; while the girl of 
the middle class, her unacknowledged half-sister, who 
is far from sharing her virtue or virtues, steals her 
lover because she can offer him social equality, in ex- 
change for which all merits weigh lightly, even in 
the mind of her highly respectable mother-in-law, 
who is indeed a sort of conspirator in her son's decep- 
tion. Lindau is a Jew, and he may take a grim 
pleasure in exclaiming with Shylock, " These be your 
Christian husbands." Again in his " Spitzen " (1888), 
the cardinal question is if any circumstances would 
justify a man in betraying the honor a woman had 
confided to him. But the public are not casuists, 
nor is the novel a suitable place for ethical discus- 
sion. Were Berlin society as Lindau paints it, it 
would hardly hold together over night. 

The same discouraged pessimism has possessed in 
recent years the work of Jensen, whose earlier stories, 
for instance the " Braune Erica" (1868), or "Eddy- 
stone " (1872) had shown a mastery of the prose idyl 
in descriptions of North German country scenes. 
Later the capital attracted him, and his annual novel 
grew gloomier every year in its treatment of the 
upper classes of society. Take, for instance, " In der 
Eremde " (1886). The pastor's daughter marries the 
young officer. Her betrothed theological student is 
left in the lurch. By and- by, when she has dis- 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 383 



covered that passion, not sympathy, drew them to- 
gether, she meets her old love, now a university tutor 
in philosophy. The name of this friend of wisdom is 
Lorenz. It might as well have been Abelard, since 
hers is Heloi'se. She hears him lecture on the fas- 
cinating topic, " The highest love is life's highest 
law." Nobody understands ; but everybody is de- 
lighted, and Heloi'se is "emancipated." In the last 
years Jensen has returned at times to his earlier 
manner; as, for instance, in the story of the Black 
Forest " Im Zwing unci Bann " (1892). 

Here, as with Heyse, there seems a sort of grudge 
in the author's mind against the basis of our social 
order ; not, as in the forties, an open attack on mar- 
riage as such, but an undermining of its outposts, and 
indirectly a plea for free divorce. A group of French 
reformers gave the key-note. No German has caught 
their tone more completely than Ernst Eckstein. 
Let us consider " Jorinde " (1888). The scene is St. 
Kemo, whither My Lady Jorinde has taken her poor 
heart to be cured of its hopeless love for the brilliant 
officer, Baron Prittwitz, who happens to be betrothed 
to another. Dr. Max cures My Lady's consumption, 
and offers her heart and hand, which are gratefully 
accepted. The young couple meet the officer. He 
has broken his engagement meantime. The old love 
claims its right in the young wife's heart. Dr. Max 
discovers the state of the case. On whom shall he 
take vengeance ? On nobody, says German law. On 
the gentleman, say the ever gallant French. On the 
lady, says Eckstein, who tells us how Dr. Max nurses 



384 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



back into activity the dormant seeds of his wife's 
consumption, and boasts of his success over her grave 
to the desolate Prittwitz. They have a duel, the 
Doctor is killed, Prittwitz becomes insane. The 
author sells several editions, and is reckoned among 
the first writers of his school. We shall meet this 
versatile man next among the — humorists. 

These are but few from the legion of social novels ; 
but they are typical of the class and sufficient for our 
purpose. These men write as reformers, they deal 
ex professo, with the exceptional and the diseased; 
but their work lacks both the literary and moral 
qualities that could give it permanent value. Prob- 
ably first in historic fiction, in this field the Germans 
must take the second, perhaps the third, place among 
the nations of Europe. 

Closely allied to these social studies are the novels 
that deal with recent politics with as much sensa- 
tional liberty as the police censorship will allow. 
The best in this poor kind is Gregor Samarow (Georg 
von Meding) who spins, on such tragedies as the 
suicide of Louis II. of Bavaria, tales that appeal 
strongly to the middle classes, but do not exist for any 
other. Somewhat higher in aim are stories written, 
so far as can be seen, solely for healthy amusement. 
First, Marlitt, with easy fecundity, raised suspense 
to a science. Through the widely circulated " Gar- 
tenlaube " she exercised for many years a predomi- 
nating influence on German women of the middle 
class, and through many translations on American 
women, also. Those whose literary memory dates 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 385 

back a decade or two will recall " Old Mamzell's 
Secret," " Goldelse," and the " Little Moorland Prin- 
cess," all painfully alike, all consulting neither natural 
nor psychological probability, all fostering a mild 
liberalism, religious and social, that accorded with, 
and doubtless promoted the- tendency of the time. 
With Marlitt may be grouped three Austrian ladies : 
Madam Ebner-Eschenbach, a high-minded noble- 
woman, who knows above all things how to tell a 
good story and enjoys the telling of it ; Ossip Schu- 
bin (Lola Kirschner) ; and Baroness von Suttner, whose 
gospel of peace, "Die Waffen Meder" (1893), re- 
cently achieved a sensational success, less perhaps 
for its merits than for its doctrine. 

A more careful student of life than these ladies, 
and appealing to a rather more cultured class than 
Marlitt, is Spielhagen, who, since 1870, has turned 
his attention from " reform " to the purveying of pop- 
ular sensation, subordinating his preaching more and 
more to the demands of publisher and bookseller. 
"Sturmflut" (1877) shows, indeed, a higher tone. 
The great storm on the Baltic furnishes the back- 
ground for a vivid picture of the speculative craze 
with which the French milliards infected Germany, 
and the fearful crash that followed. There is some- 
thing epic in the rush of water here and of panic 
there, each a whirlpool of ruin. The ball on the 
eve of the crisis — dancing on a volcano — is the best 
single chapter in Spielhagen's work, and suggests 
Thackeray's Brussels before Waterloo. But in later 
years, Spielhagen's prolific pen takes more and more 

25 



386 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



the easy tone that suits the mental dyspepsia of his 
readers. " Quisisana" (1880) "roars you as gently as 
any sucking dove ; " " Die Schouen Amerikanerinnen " 
(1884) is a commonplace story of a commonplace 
swindler and his interesting daughters ; and " Hans 
und Grete " belongs to the naive peasant tales, — of 
which, more presently. In general, Spielhagen's 
sympathies are democratic still, — probably because 
most of his readers share them. To this he occasion- 
ally sacrifices proportion, and caricatures his noble- 
men. He is weakest in the development of character, 
most witty in his dialogue, and strongest in action 
and plot. 

Spielhagen and Marlitt may represent the enter- 
taining social novel. Another group depends on the 
exotic for attraction. Franzos is wont to carry us to 
Galicia, Polodia, or the plains of Eastern Eussia, 
which his imagination peoples with weird and wild 
creations. Lindau lays the scene of several novels 
in America, Jokai's Hungarian tales are familiar to 
American readers through cheap translations, and the 
rich imagination of Sacher-Masoch has run wild riot 
in unsavory stories of Eussia, Galicia, and Vienna, 
wmose pessimism is but a thinly disguised cultus of 
Venus Vulgivaga. Then there is a whole group of 
men who follow Auerbach with the unequal steps of 
little lulus, and give us village stories, or, as the 
fashion now sets, Swiss and Tyrolese tales and Bava- 
rian highland scenes. Doubtless there is a public 
for these sentimental milkmaids and sighing shep- 
herds, — for the pessimistic jodlers and Alpine dis- 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 387 



ciples of Schopenhauer. Anzengriiber, Rosegger, and 
their like have readers, probably more than they would 
have in 'any other country, but they represent only 
an eddy in the current. 1 Still, at present the number 
of these exotic and pastoral romances is great, much 
greater than their excellence. Such abundance is 
striking, for in France this genus was rare till Loti 
begau to write, and the German development seems 
independent of England, which might have furnished 
helpful models. 

It- is a parlous thing to speak of foreign humor, 
and I forego any effort to analyze the art by which 
Wilhelm Raabe, in spite of his pessimistic resigna- 
tion, manages to win a smile even from the seamy 
side of life. He lays his stories in out of the way 
villages, takes for his characters as out of the way 
people as Dickens, and treats them with as delight- 
ful minuteness, though his earlier stories, "Der 
HeiligeBorn" (1861) and " Die Horacker " (1872), 
have a fresher spirit than the later, which is strange 
when we consider the general course of German liter- 
ature before and since the seventies. More boisterous 
than Raabe is Eckstein, who has made a specialty 
of studies of the comic side of school life, for whose 
bubbling humor one is disposed to thank him more 
than for his social or classical novels. 

Perhaps the most remarkable living German hu- 
morist is Stinde. It is difficult to speak with moder- 

1 Schonbach, on the other hand, thinks Anzengniber "of the 
highest merit ; " his drama " Das Viorte Gebot," immortal ; and 
the story " Sternsteinkopf," hardly inferior to the former. 



388 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



ation of his photographic accuracy in the affectionate 
study of middle-class Berlin life. We look no longer 
through the red glasses of Lindau, but we see every- 
day life as we hope it is in many thousand homes in 
the city by the Spree. An account of the trip of the 
" Buchholz Family " to Italy opened the series in 1884. 
Then Frau Buchholz began to write letters to one of 
the Berlin papers, whose readers were gradually roused 
to see that a literary masterpiece was appearing 
where one is not wont to look for such, even in Ger- 
many. The letters were soon collected in a volume, 
and had a success hardly paralleled in a country 
where ten thousand counts as a hundred thousand in 
France. The " Buchholz Family" (1885) ap- 
proached the larger figure, and a second part (1886) 
added to the author's success in this unique field, 
which a final volume (1887) could not more than 
maintain. These books have been done into English, 
though it is surprising that any one with wit enough 
to care to attempt it should not have had wit enough 
to let it alone. It is as if one should translate the 
" Biglow Papers " into French. He who has not 
learned Berlinese from the lips of one of themselves 
will hardly ever come to appreciate the racy flavor of 
Frau Buchholz's language. It is no such German as 
we ever saw in print before, but every line recalls 
to the initiated reader some memory of old student 
days. This was the way his landlady or his washer- 
woman used to talk, — the same dry humor, the same 
skeptical half-culture, the same keen worldly wisdom, 
the same colossal belief in Berlin. And the humor 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 389 



is so fresh, so genial, so healthy, so different from the 
melancholy that pervades the books we have been con- 
sidering since we left Freytag and his fellows. But, 
of course, after all this is only the play of genius. 

If we turn to other fields of imaginative literature 
during this period, we shall find less originality, but 
a like spirit. In drama, except ( for the Eealists, 
especially Wildenbruch and Sudermann, to whom 
there will be occasion to recur, translations or adap- 
tations from the French predominate, The historical 
and patriotic drama has its representatives in Heyse, 
especially in his earlier period, 1 and in Ludwigs, 
Greif, 2 and Mosen. 3 Wilbrandt's " Krimhild " (1877) 
and Hebbel's "Nibelungen " (1863), have endeavored 
to give dramatic life to the heroic saga, and various 
" Lutherspiele " have tried the same for the German 
Reformation. But here, as with fiction, the tendency 
is strong toward the treatment of the social prob- 
lems of modern life. Freytag opens the period of 
which we are treating with "Die Journalisten " 
(1854), on the whole perhaps the most artistically 
perfect of recent German comedies. The most sig- 
nificant of the later dramas of society are Heyse's 
"HansLange" (1866), "Die Maler," by Wilbrandt, 
and Fitger's tragic "Von Gottes Gnaden" (1883), 
and "Die Ptosen von Tyburn" (1888). A place 
apart must be assigned to Anzengruber's peasant 

1 "Ludwig der Bayer" (1862), " Meleager " (1854), "Die 
Sabinnerinnen " (1859). His later dramas are less significant. 

2 E. g., " Prinz Eugen " (1880), " Heinrich der Lowe " (1886), 
"Kcmradin" (1888), " Ludwig der Bayer" (1891). 

3 E. g., "Otto der Dritte " and "Heinrich der Vogler." 



390 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



dramas, 1 which have been hailed with incoherent 
admiration by some lovers of the eccentric, but seem 
to promise little for the development of art. Among 
the living writers of light comedy for the daily needs 
of a degenerate stage, the best — Blumenthal, Lindau, 
and L'Arronge 2 — are not remarkable, and all their 
humor has a touch of blighting irony. 

Genuine epic poetry we should hardly look for in 
these days, and the few attempts are obvious fail- 
ures. Here the most attractive field is naturally the 
old saga, which Karl Simrock has worked industri- 
ously in his popular translations of the " Mbelun- 
gen," " Gudrun," " Parzival," and other mediaeval 
epics. More ambitious than he, and a truer poet, is 
Hertz, whose " Launcelot and Ginevra" (1860), 
" Hugdietrich's Brautfahrt" (1863), and "Tristan" 
(1877) are excellent as original antiquarian revivals. 
Jordan, too, has written a " Nibelunge " (1868-1874), 
and Lingg has essayed to treat the "Great Migra- 
tion" in ottave rime. 

More modern in character are Heyse's " Thekla " 
(1858) and Hebbel's "Mutter und Kind" (1859), 
while Hamerling's "Homunculus" represents the 
little trodden path of epic satire, though the other 
epics of this writer had been strictly historical, — 
" Ahasverus in Kom," treating of the times of Nero, 

1 For instance, "Der Fleck auf der Ehre," or " Meineidbauern." 

2 Among the most recent works of these men may he cited 
Blumenthal's " Der Zanngast " (1889), " Grossstadtluft " (1891), 
"Das Zweite Gesicht " (1890), Lindan's "Der Kombdiant" 
(1892)," Der Andere" (1893); L'Arronge's " Heimchen " (1883), 
"Loreley" (1885), " Lolos Vater" (1893). 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 391 



and " Der Konig von Sion," of the Anabaptist agita- 
tion in Minister. To still another category belong the 
popular narrative epics, in the spirit of " Ekkehard," 
some of which, in spite of their pseudo-medisevalism, 
have achieved remarkable popularity, and have fil- 
tered down to a stratum of the reading public that is 
not reached by the psychological novel. 1 And 
finally, that nothing may be wanting to the epic 
feast, the Naturalists have contributed their obolos 
in Hart's " Lied von der Menschheit," though there 
is a certain incongruity between this form of poetic 
expression and the tenets of their school. 

It appears, then, that epic verse has still a hold on 
the masses, and, in its antiquarian development, a 
charm for the hypercultured, but it is not in touch 
with the moving forces of modern thought. Mean- 
time, lyric poetry has had a somewhat similar fate. 
It has lost much of the freedom of form that made the 
charm of Heine, and, so far as it is not iconoclastic, 
is rather dreary reading. The Chauvinistic singers 
who beat la grande caisse so vigorously in 1870 — 
Geibel, Becker, Eedwitz, and Jensen — are not read 
to-day, though they are occasionally sung by uncrit- 
ical patriots. Freiligrath, who was associated with 
them, is saved from sharing this lot by some earlier 
pieces, while Hebbel's ballads and songs, and the 
minstrel lays of Scheffel's " Gaudeamus," are humbler 

1 For instance, Julius Wolffs "Wilder Jager " reached its sixty- 
ninth edition in 1892, and his other narrative epics range from nine- 
teen to fifty-nine thousand (Kiirschner, 1891). " Dreizehnlinden," 
of the Roman Catholic Weber, is close behind with sixty thousand. 



392 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



efforts, but genuinely and deservedly popular, — 
much more so than. Heyse's more artificial verse, 
which best represents to-day the formal perfection of 
Platen and the grace of Heine, but shows rather a 
sensitively critical than a creative poetic spirit. 

Perhaps it lies in the nature of our time, dominated 
by the practical interests of material development, 
that epic and lyric poetry should cease for a time to 
be the modes in which the average culture would 
find its literary expression, while the drama becomes 
less a means of moving men than of entertaining 
them. But we might at least, in such a case, look 
to a bold and positive criticism to lay bare the 
shortcomings of authorship, and show the causes 
of its weakness. As Goethe said, " we need a man 
like Lessing," — we need such fearless, deep-probing 
criticism as the " Dramaturgy," the " Literary Let- 
ters," or the " Laokoon." But the German criticism of 
our day has not risen to this high function. Kather, 
it has fallen into contempt. It is often venal, still 
often er narrow, and far from those broad views that 
made the work of Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller in 
this field truly constructive and helpful. 

This is the excuse for being of a rebellious school, 
whose character has been just hinted in the word 
"iconoclastic," — a group that sometimes calls itself 
"Young Germany," with a reminiscence of 1848, and 
sometimes " The Piealist School," though it should not 
be confounded with the like-named group in France. 
It has more and manifold points of contact with 
that Parisian coterie which rejoices in the name of 



IMAGINATIVE LITEEATUEE SINCE 1850. 393 



Decadent. At the head of this movement is Bleib- 
treu, more important as a critic than as an original 
writer, though he has resented the suggestion. Their 
organs have been the " Maoazin fur die Litteratur des 
In- und Auslandes " and " Die Gesellschaft." They 
are a rather numerous body of zealous young writers, 
born for the most part in the twenty years preceding 
the French war, who, in striking out new paths, begin 
with a wholesale condemnation of the old, especially 
of the " weak lemonade " and " sugar-water erotics " 
as Bleibtreu happily designates the lyrics of Scheffel, 
Geibel, and their like. These younger men mean to 
be strong ; they often end in being coarse. It is the 
untutored zeal of the " Storm and Stress " over 
again. Would that a second classical period might 
follow it, but of that there is at this day no sign. 

All these men, like the other discontented youth 
of Germany, are deeply tinged with socialism, — so 
deeply that some of their work is published in Swit- 
zerland to avoid the censorship. They are also, for the 
most part, violently, and rather incoherently, blas- 
phemous, according to Christian standards ; which, if 
it signify anything, must mean that Christianity is 
still Germany's strongest bulwark against social revo- 
lution. Holz proclaims himself, with characteristic 
modesty, " the Nazarite, the inborn son of Deity." 
Gradnauer says : " I am chosen, like Moses and 
Christ ; I come to deliver." So, after all, it seems these 
men recognize the Deity against whom, like fallen 
spirits, they rebel. With this attitude to religion, they 
will naturally be iconoclasts in other fields. 



394 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



Most characteristic of these writers is their thor- 
ough belief in themselves. Bleibtreu makes bold to 
declare, " I neither see now, nor shall I ever see, any 
reason to change my opinions." This is in his preface 
to the " Literary Revolution." Again, in the " Kampf 
urns Dasein der Literatur," we learn that realism 
" has three stages, which best show themselves in 
their chief representatives, the lyric in Liliencron, 
the fresh, natural, full-blooded painter of feeling; 
the epic in Kretzer, the socialistic novelist ; the dra- 
matic in its widest sense, embracing the lyric, epic, 
and psychologic-philosophic, in — myself." Further 
on, he says that his novel " Dies Irae '.' " will hardly 
ever be surpassed in its symbolic significance, and 
fulfils completely all the artistic laws of the newly 
created genre." And yet, in spite of this rodomon- 
tade, Bleibtreu is a genius. 

He and his fellows run amuck at the current liter- 
ature because it is conventional, and addressed in the 
main to the ladies of society, whose minds he thinks 
by nature emasculate. The new literature must gird 
itself to deal with antagonisms of race and great 
questions of social order. Its realism is to be Shak- 
spere's, not Zola's. Critics not of his shibboleth he 
treats with a contempt so fierce as to be almost 
laughable, and yet there is a vigor and brilliancy in 
Bleibtreu's pamphlets that we hardly find paralleled 
to-day in Germany. 

Not content with revolutionizing lyric poetry, this 
school has laid violent hands on the novel. In his- 
toric fiction Bleibtreu has made the wars of the two 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 395 



Napoleons his peculiar field. "Dies Irae"(1882), 
"a realistic epic of the world's history," deals with 
the French war, and, in its graphic picture of Sedan, 
affords interesting material for comparison with Zola's 
"Ddb&cle." The same versatile writer has given us 
a Nibelungen story (1884), of which he allows that 
"the technique is incomplete," and has attempted the 
exotic in " Norway Tales " (1883). He has also done 
striking work in historic literary criticism. 

Far less extravagant than Bleibtreu, though essen- 
tially of his school, is Wildenbruch, who in his dramas 
has tried to do for the national spirit what Dahn and 
Freytag have done in their novels. " Die Quitzows " 
(1888), "Die Karolinger" (1882), and " Der Neue 
Herr" (1891) are remarkable literary expressions of 
the personified Prussian spirit. In short stories, too, 
and in his social dramas, Wildenbruch shows great 
originality in tragic development. 1 Another dramatist 
of as great power, and perhaps greater promise, is Su- 
dermann, whose " Ehre " (1890) and " Sodom's Ende " 

(1891) , achieved sensational success, while " Heimat," 
his last drama (1893), attained thirteen editions in a 
single year. 2 His best novels, " Frau Sorge " (1887), 
"Katzensteg" (1889), and "Iolanthe's Hochzeit" 

1 For instance, " Die Astronomen " (1887), " Vor den Schran- 
ken" (1885), " Franceska von Rimini " (1893) ; Die Huubenlerche 

(1892) . 

2 Other noteworthy dramatists and dramas of this school are 
Hauptmann, "Die Weber" (1892); Richard Voss, " Neue Zeit " 

(1891) , "Malaria" (1892), "Jttrg Jenatsch " (1893), Wnnderkind 

(1892) ; Fulda, " Die Sklavin " (1891), " Das Verlorene Raradies " 
(1891); Kirchbach, " Die Waiblinger " (1886). 



396 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



(1892), are hardly less admirable in technique and 
power, coupled, in the last case, with original humor 
of a high order. He is certainly the most promising 
of the new Eealists, for the novels of Sudermann 
have shown a steady growth in clearness of vision 
and firmness of touch, — as is only natural, since the 
author was but thirty years old when " Frau Sorge " 
was published. 1 This is a pathetic Odyssey of duty, 
strong in its psychological analysis so far as the im- 
mediate family of the hero are concerned, but not 
satisfactory in its climax, and showing serious roman- 
tic aberrations in the minor characters, and in the 
katabasis of the closing chapter. The two years that 
followed brought the declaration of independence of 
the new school in Bleibtreu's pamphlets, 2 and wit- 
nessed a marked crystallization in Sudermann's lit- 
erary conceptions and methods. He seems to have 
passed through the experience, and come to the 
vision, that he attributes to the hero of " Katzensteg," 
the magnanimous Boseslav, to whom, as his tragic 
fate closed around him, it had seemed " as though 
the mists were lifted that separated the basis of 
human being from that of human consciousness, as 
though he could see a step deeper than men are wont 
to do into the abyss of the unknown. What men 

1 A hint in the dedicatory verses suggests that the story was 
written in the year of its publication. It had been preceded by the 
less significant "Im Zwielicht," and followed in the next year 
(1888) by "Die Geschwister," which also offers no special occasion 
for critical comment. 

2 "Revolution in der Literatur" (1887), " Kanip urns Dasein 
dor Literatur" (1888). 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 397 



call ' good ' and ' evil ' floated before him anchorless on 
superficial mists; below them rested, in slumbering 
strength, the Natural." 

Thus Sudermann makes his literary profession of 
faith. But the high-minded pessimism of " Der Kat- 
zensteg " has since yielded to the serener philosophy 
of life that brightens " Iolanthe's Hochzeit." Satire, 
indeed, there is still, and it is still keen beyond 
the common; but it is less fierce, less pessimistic, 
more kindly. There were no such ghastly touches 
in " Katzensteg " as those that the funeral of Paul's 
mother afforded in " Frau Sorge ; " there was less that 
was persistently harrowing, more of the tragic con- 
flict of a noble soul with fate. Yet there, too, all 
was still sombre and stern. But in " Iolanthe's 
Hochzeit " we have turned from abnormal realism to 
the realism of common life, to what is within the 
raDge of ordinary experience and sympathy ; we 
breathe freer, we feel more at home. . This last of 
Sudermann's stories, though a shorter and less am- 
bitious effort, yields nothing in its seriousness of 
psychological analysis to the earlier and longer 
novels. It leaves as deep an impression and a 
pleasanter memory. 

The most thoroughgoing writers in the new school 
are the dramatist Hauptmann, who is the most brutal 
of the group, but not without power, and Kretzer, 
" another whom Zola has quite spoiled," as a dyspeptic 
critic tells us, — a man of remarkable strength in por- 
traying the fierce instincts of . the proletariat, and a 
pessimist with much bitterness of indignation at 



398 



MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE. 



what seem to him social wrongs. " Such strength of 
soul-painting, such depth of characterization, such 
power of passion, such reckless energy and dauntless- 
ness in the poetic grasp of the most fearful sufferings 
and sins, such a Shaksperian tragic sweep, has never 
yet "been seen in German literature," says Bleibtreu, 1 
and there is truth mingled with the obvious exagger- 
ation. The titles of his novels are significant : " The 
Deceived " (1882), " The Ruined " (« Die Verkomme- 
nen," 1883), " The Socialist Tornado " (1883), "Three 
Women" (1886), — this last perhaps the best of all, 
unless we prefer " Meister Timpe " (1888). But it 
is foolish to presume to measure Kretzer with Zola. 
He shares with the great Frenchman a certain care- 
lessness in rhetoric ; he makes new words and misuses 
old ones, as does Zola. " Germinal " and " Die Ver- 
kommenen " offer the nearest subjects of comparison, 
but Kretzer never attains Zola's wide sweep and epic 
grandeur. Other writers of fiction in the Naturalistic 
school are Hartleben, Von Roberts, and Kirchbach, 
all of whom have attempted the drama also. 

Indeed, the zeal with which these men have seized 
on the stage as a means of literary propagandism is 
remarkable. In Berlin they have organized a theat- 
rical club that there may be a "Freie Biihne," a 
stage independent of the police censorship, where all 
theories may be tried and threshed out before a criti- 
cal public. And yet it is doubtful if this labor is not 
in vain, doubtful if the drama can ever be made a 
great social or reforming power in an age when 

1 " Revolution in der Literatur" (1887), p. 37. 



IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE SINCE 1850. 399 

primary education and the newspaper are within the 
reach of all classes of society to which the theatre 
could possibly appeal. Hence it is probable, unless 
unforeseen events produce some great change in the 
spirit of the time, that the development of literature 
will for the present be chiefly in the direction of 
prose fiction ; and therefore it is encouraging to find 
that just here there is the greatest independence of 
foreign influence, the greatest individuality, and the 
greatest hope of healthy development in the aesthetic 
tas£e of the German nation. 



INDEX. 



Embracing German authors and rulers with their dates, and the German 
titles of the more important works, with their authorship. 



Abderiten, Die (Wieland), 53, 
54, 58. 

Abraham a Sancta Clara (d. 1709), 
262. 

Achilleis (Goethe), 46, 165. 
Ahnen, Die (Freytag), 374. 
Alcuin (b. 735, d. 804), 7. 
Alexander the Great (Epic), 3 t 9. 
Alexis, W. (b. 1798, d. 1871), 337, 
370. 

Amalie, Duchess, 131, 133, 157. 
Anti-Goeze (Lessing), 96. 
Anzengruber, 387, 389. 
Arminius (Hermann), 12. 
Arnim, Achim v. (b. 1781, d. 1831), 
320. 

Arnim, Bettina v. (b. 3785, d. 

1859), 125, 166, 319, 322. 
Arnim, Henriette v., 234. 
Arthur, Epics of, 3, 19-24. 
Ashton, Luise (fl. 1850), 368. 
Atta, Troll (Heine), 325, 354-355. 
Attila (Etzel, b. 406, d. 453), 12, 

13. 

Auerbach, B. (b. 1812), 378-379, 
386. 

Becker, Karl (b. 1853), 391. 
Berengar (Lessing's Defence of), 95. 



Bible, 2, 7, 31-33, 44. 
Biron, Friedericke (d. 1813), 

137, 140, 141. 
Biterolf, Epic, 14. 



119, 



Bleibtreu, K. (b. 1859), 393, 394- 
395. 

Blumenthal, O. (b. 1852), 390. 
Bodmer, J. J. (b. 1698, d. 1783),' 

38, 43, 44, 49, 50. 
Borne, L. (b. 1786, d. 1837), 305- 

306, 354. 
Brandt, S. (d. 1521), 30. 
Braut, v., Messina (Schiller) 276- 

281, 284. 
Breitinger, J. J. (b. 1701, d. 1776), 

38, 43. 

Brentano, C. (b. 1778, d. 1842), 

319-320. 
Brentano, Bettina v., see Arnim. 
Buch der Lieder (Heine), 328. 
Buchholz, Die Familie (Stinde), 

387-389. 

Buch le Grand (Heine), see Reise- 
bilder. 

Buff, Charlotte, see Kestner. 



Chamisso, A. v. (b. 1781, d. 1838), 
337. 

Charlemagne, see Karl. 

Chrestien of Troyes (fl. 1195), 20, 

22, 23. 
Christ, Legends of, 9. 
Cid (Herder), 69, 70. 
Clauren (fl. 1816), 322. 
Clavigo (Goethe), 119, 125, 128, 

192. 

Conrad of Wurzburg (d. 1287), 18. 



20 



402 



INDEX. 



Dahn, F. (b. 1834), 48, 372-373, 

375, 395. 
Demetrius (Schiller), 288. 
Deutscher Mercur, 55, 56. 
Deutschland (Heine), 355. 
Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe), 

112, 120, 167, 169-170, 178. 
Dietrich v. Bern, see Theodoric. 
Don Carlos (Schiller), 229, 232- 

236, 238, 276, 285. 



Ebers, G. (b. 1837), 371. 
Ebner-Eschenbach, M. v. (b. 1830), 
385. 

Eckstein, E. (b. 1845), 372, 383- 
384, 387. 

Egmont (Goethe), 120, 128, 144, 

145, 148, 156, 192, 234, 252. 
Eichendorff, J. v. (b. 1788, d. 

1857), 321. 
Eilhard of Oberge (fl. 1170), 21. 
Ekkehard (Scheffel), 370. 
Emilia Galotti (Lessing), 94, 96-99, 

222, 232. 
Eneid (Veldecke), 18. 
Epics, Middle High German, 3, 11, 

18-24, 57. 
Erasmus (b. 1466, d. 1536), 31. 
Eric (Hartmann v. Aue), 19. 
Ermenrich (d. 374), 14. 
Erziehung d. Menschengeschlechtes 

(Lessing), 102, 106. 
Eulenspiegel (Murner), 30. 



Faust (Goethe), 79, 118, 120, 128, 
135. 137, 145, 147-149, 159, 164, 
169, 176, 179, 181-218. 

Fichte, J. G. (b. 1762, d. 1814), 131, 
309. 

Fiesco (Schiller), 228, 229-230. 
Fischart (b. 1550, d. 1590), 34, note. 
Fitger, A. (b. 1840), 389. 
Flachsland, Caroline (Herder), 65, 
66, 97. 

Flegeljahre (Richter), 299-300. 



Floris and Blancheflor, Epic, 18. 
Fontane, T. (b. 1819), 381. 
Fouque, F. de la M. (b. 1777, d. 

1843), 311, 337. 
Franzos, E. (b. 1848), 386. 
Frederic Barbarossa (reigned 1152- 

1190), 8, 18, 24, 40, 379. 
Frederic II. (reigned 1212-1250), 

10, 11, 24, 40. 

Frederic II. (reigned 1740-1786), 5, 

11, 37, 38-42, 48, 76, 78, 79, 85, 129. 
Frederic William III. (reigned 1797- 

1840), 287. 

Freiligrath,F.(b. 1810, d. 1876), 391. 

Freimaurer, Gesprache fur (Les- 
sing), 106-107. 

Frevtag, G. (b. 1816, d. 1895), 48, 
373-375, 376, 389, 395. 

Frick, Ida (fl. 1850), 368. 

Friedericke Biron, see Biron. 

Fulda, L. (b. 1862)" 395, note. 



Geibel, E. (b. 1815, d. 1884), 391, 
393. 

Geisterseher (Schiller), 237, 296. 
Gellert, C. F. (b. 1715, d. 1769), 38, 
41, 43. 

Gerhardt, P. (b. 1607, d. 1676), 35, 
36. 

Gleim, J. W. L. (b. 1719, d. 1803). 
40, 50, 67, 78, 81, 109, 134. 

Goethe, J. W. v. (b. 1749, d. 1832), 
111-218, 4, 5, 21, 23, 26, 30, 35, 
38, 46, 52, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 62, 66, 
67, 68, 72, 78, 79, 80, 84, 90, 97, 108, 
219-220, 223, 227, 239-240, 241, 
248, 251, 255, 274, 276, 281, 282, 
288, 289, 297, 307-308, 337-338. 

Gotter, Helden u. Wieland (Goethe), 
55. 

Gbtz (Goethe), 119, 120, 122-124, 

148, 153, 186, 192. 
Goeze, J. M. (fl. 1780), 103-105. 
Gottfried of Strasburg (fl. 1210), 

19, 20-21. 
Gottschall, Pi. (b. 1823), 373. 



INDEX. 



403 



Gottsched, J. C. (b. 1700, d. 1766), 
36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 79. 

Gradnauer, 393. 

Greif, M. (b. 1839), 389. 

Grimmelshausen, H. J. C. (d. 
1676), 35-36. 

Gronlandische Processe (Richter), 
291. 

Gudrun, Epic, 2, 11, 12, 15-17, 185. 
Guzkow, K. (b. 1811, d. 1878), 
367. 



Hahn Hahn, Ida (b. 1805, d. 

1873), 368. 
Hamburgische Dramaturgic (Les- 

sing), 85-88, 91, 96. 
Hamerling, E. (b. 1830, d. 1889), 

372, 390. 
Hart, H. (b. 1855), 391. 
Hartleben, O. (b. 1864), 398. 
Hartmann v. Aue (d. cir. 1220), 

11, 19-20, 21, 57. 
Harzreise, see Reisebilder. 
Hauff, W. (b. 1802, d. 1827), 322. 
Hauptmann, G. (b. 1862), 395, note, 

397. 

Hebbel, F. (b. 1813, d. 1861), 389, 
390, 391. 

Hegel, G. W. F. (b.1770, d. 1831), 

131, 337. 
Heiberg, H. (b. 1810), 381. 
Heine, Amalie, 331, 332. 
Heine, Heinrich (b. 1799, d. 1856), 

324-361, 6. 13, 35, 60, 111, 140, 

175, 289, 311, 391, 392. 
Heinrich v. Ofterdingen (Novalis), 

317-319. 
Heldenbnch (Maximilian), 30. 
Heliand, Epic, 2, 44. 
Herder, J. G. (b. 1744, d. 1803), 

01-72, 38, 56, 60, 84, 85, 90, 112, 

119, 120-121, 136, 140, 185, 261, 

298, 307. 
Hermann, see Arminius. 
Hermann urid Dorothea (Goethe), 

46, 58, 135, 159, 163-164. 



Hertz, W. (b. 1835), 390. 
Herzog Ernst, Epic, 9. 
Hesperus (Richter), 293-295. 
Heyse, P. (b. 1830), 380-381, 389, 

390, 392. 
Hildebrandslied, 3. 
Hillern, W. v. (b. 1836), 369. 
Hoffmann, E. T. W. (b. 1776, d. 

1822), 322. 
Holz, A. (b. 1863), 393. 
Hopfen, H. (b. 1835), 378. 
Horen, Die, 159-160, 217, 252, 253. 
Hymnen an die Nacht (Novalis), 

315. 



Ixsel Felsenburg, Romance, 36. 
Iphigenie (Goethe), 139, 144, 145- 
147. 

Iwein (Hartmann v. Aue), 19. 



Jean Paul, see Richter. 

Jensen, W. (b. 1837), 382-383, 

391. 
Jokai, 386. 

Jordan, W. (b. 1819), 390. 
Judgment, Visions of, 7, 9. 
Judith, Epic, 9. 

Jungfrau v. Orleans (Schiller), 
272-275. 



Kabale u. Liebe (Schiller), 229- 
232. 

Kampf urn Rom (Dahn), 372-373. 
Kant, I. (b. 1721, d. 1801), 63, 85, 
217, 3C9. 

Karl August (Weimar), 51, 120- 

131, 133, 138, 141, 150, 154, 157, 

105, 177, 179, 180, 260. 
Karl the Great (b. 742, d. 814), 3, 

7, 8, 9, 19. 
Katzensteg (Sudermann), 396. 
Keller, G. (b. 1819, d. 1889), 377. 
Kestner, Charlotte, 124-127, 140, 

174. 



404 



INDEX. 



Kinder der Welt (Heyse), 380. 
Kirchbach, W. (b. 1857). 395, note, 
398. 

Kirschner Lola (Ossip Schubin) 

(b. 1854), 385. 
Kleist, H. v. (b. 1777, d. 1811), 48, 

65, 320-321. 
Klettenberg, Frl. v., 118, 162, 184. 
Klopstock, F. G. (b. 1724, d. 1803;, 

37. 38, 44-48, 50, 52, 65, 74, 79, 

134, 140, 223, 307. 
Klotz, C. A. (d. 1772), 88-91. 
Knaben Wunderhorn, Des, 320. 
Kbnig, Eva, 66, 91-94, 99-101. 
Korner, T. (b. 1791, d. 1813), 233. 
Komet (Richter), 305. 
Konrad, see Conrad. 
Kotzebue, A. v. (b. 1761, d. 1819), 

314. 

Kretzer, M. (b. 1854), 394, 397-398. 
Krist (Otfrid). 2. 



Lambrecht (fl. 1120), 19. 
Laokoon (Leasing), 69, 80, 83, 117. 
Laroche, Maximiliane v., 125. 
Laroche, Sophie v., 51, 232, 319. 
L'Arronge, A. (b. 1838), 390. 
Laube, H. (b. 1806, d. 1884), 368. 
Laune des Verliebten (Goethe), 117. 
Lavater (d. 1801), 55, 58. 
Lazarus (Heine), 359-361. 
Leiden d. j. Werthers (Goethe), 

120, 125-128, 133, 149, 153, 167, 

223, 366. 

Lengenfeld, Charlotte (Schiller), 
161, 238-239, 241, 244-246, 276, 
287. 

Lessing, G. E (b. 1729, d. 1781 ), 73- 
110, 6, 10, 37, 38, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 
67, 69, 112, 124, 177, 184, 307. 

Levana (Richter), 300. 

Lewald, F. (b. 1811, d. 1889), 368, 
369. 

Lichtenstein (Hauff), 322. 
Lichtenstein, Ulrich v. (d. cir. 
1275), 26, 27, 28. 



Lied v. d. Glocke, Das (Schiller), 

257, 268. 
Lili, see Schbnemann. 
Liliencron, D. v. (b. 1844), 394. 
Lindau, P. (b. 1839), 381-382, 386, 

390. 

Lingg, H. (b. 1820), 390. 

Lohengrin, Epic, 24. 

Lorelei (Heine), 320. 

Lotte, see Kestner. 

Lucinde (Schlegel), 312, 366-368. 

Ludwigs, F. (b. 1849), 389. 

Ludwigslied, 7. 

Luise, Duchess, 130, 131, 133, 137, 
180. 

Luise, Idyl (Voss), 46. 

Luther, M. (b. 1483, d. 1546), 31, 

32-34, 35, 46, 177, 181-183. 
Lutherspiele, 389. 



Maria Stuart (Schiller), 261,267, 
269-271. 

Marlitt (E. John, b. 1825, d. 1887), 

368, 384. 
Mary, Virgin, Legends of, 9. 
Mauthner, F. (b. 1849), 381. 
Maximilian I. (reigned 1493-1519), 

30. 

Meding, G. v. (Gregor Samarow), 
384. 

Meissner, A. v. (b. 1822, d. 1885), 
378. 

Meistersanger, 28. 
Melanchthon (b. 1497, d. 1560), 32. 
Memoiren (Heine), 358. 
Mendelssohn, M. (d. 1786), 77, 
101. 

Messias (Klopstock), 44-45, 47. 
Meyer, K. F. (b. 1825, d. 1889), 375. 
Minna v. Barnhelm (Lessing), 80, 

81-83, 91, 94, 96. 
Minnesiinger, 11, 26. 
Miss Sara Sampson (Lessing), 80, 

81, 232. 

Mitschuldigen, Die (Goethe), 117, 
124. 



INDEX. 



405 



Mosen, F. (b. 1803, d. 1867), 389. 
Mulilbach, L. (b. 1814, d. 1873), 
367. 

Musenalmanach, 160, 254. 



Narrenschiff (Brandt), 30. 
Nathan d. Weise (Lessing), 10, 96, 

99, 105-106. 
Natiirliche Tochter, Die (Goethe), 

165, 281. 

Neffe als Onkel, Der (Schiller), 282. 
Neidhard of Reuenthal (cir. 1215), 

26, 27, 28. 
Neuser, Lessing's Defence of, 95. 
Niebelungenlied, Epic, 2, 11, 12- 

14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 39, 185. 
Nicholai, F. (d. 1811), 77, 85, 297, 

306, 313. 
Nordeney, see Reisebilder. 
Novalis (F. v. Hardeuberg, b. 1772, 

d. 1801), 315-319. 
No vela Picaresca, 35. 



Oberon (Wieland), 57-58. 
Opitz, M. (b. 1597, d. 1639), 34, 

note. 
Orendel, Epic, 10. 
Ortnit, Epic, 15. 
Oswald, Legend of King, 10, 21. 
Otfrid (cir. 850), 2, 44. 
Otto (reigned 936-973), 8. 



Parzivat, (Wolfram), 22, 23, 21. 
Platen, A. v. (b. 1796, d. 1835), 
46, 348, 392. 

Quintus Fixlein (Richter), 295- 
296, 298. 

Raabe, W. (b. 1831), 387. 
Rabbi v. Bacharach (Heine). 341. 
Rauber, Die (Schiller), 223-228. 
Rahel (Levin) v. Ense, 337, 339. 



Redwitz, O. v. (fl. 1850), 391. 
Reimarus (b. 1694, d. 1768), 101- 
103. 

Reineke Fuchs (Goethe), 30, 158. 
Reisebilder (Heine), 336, 337, 342- 
348. 

Reuchlin (b. 1455, d. 1522), 31, 34. 
Richter, J. P. F. (b. 1763, d. 1825), 

289-306, 38, 308. 
Rinaldo Rinaldini (Vulpius), 154. 
Ring, M. (b. 1817), 381. 
Roberts, A. v. 398. 
Robinsonaden, 36. 
Romancero (Heine), 359-360. 
Romanische Elegien (Goethe), 150, 

157, 160, 163. 
Romantische Schule (Heine) 351. 
Rosegger, P. K. (b. 1843), 387. 
Rosengarten, Epic, 14. 
Rother, Epic, 9. 



Sacher-Masoch (b. 1836), 386. 
Sachs, Hans (b. 1494, d. 1576), 29, 

34, note, 57, 189. 
Saints, Legends of, 10. 
Scheffel, J. V. v. (b. 1826, d. 1886), 

370-371, 391, 393. 
Schelling (b. 1775, d. 1854), 309. 
Schelmuffsky, 36. 
Schiller, J. C. F. v. (b. 1759, d. 

1805), 219-289, 38, 60, 62, 69, 78, 

85, 87, 98, 154, 155, 156, 159-161, 

165, 176-177, 195, 297, 307-308. 
Schlegel, A. Wilhelm (b. 1766, d. 

1845), 97, 248, 283, 307, 308, 311. 
Schlegel, F. (b. 1772, d. 1829), 248, 

307, 312-313. 
Schleierniacher (b. 1768, d. 1834), 

321, 337. 

Schonemann, Lili, 128, 141, 165, 
178. 

Schonkopf, Katchen, 117, 118. 
Schopenhauer, J. (b. 1766, d. 1836), 
368. 

Siebenkiis (Richter), 296. 
Siegfried, Legends of, 12-14. 



I 



406 



INDEX. 



Simplicissimus (Grimmelshausen) 

35-36. 

Simrock, K. (d. 1876), 390. 
Soil u. Habea (Freytag), 376-377. 
Spielhagen, F. (b. 1829), 378, 385. 
Spmdler, K. (b. 1795, d. 1855) 

370. ' 
Stein, Charlotte v., 132, 136, 137- 

141, 145, 153, 233, 246, 296. 
Sternbalds Wanderungen (Tieck), 

314. 

Stimmen der Volker (Herder), 68, 

Stinde, J. (b. 1841), 387-389. 
Storm, T. (d. 1888), 377-378. 
Sudermann, H. (b. 1857), 389, 395- 
397. 

Suttner, Bertha v. (b. 1843), 385. 



Tannhauser (d. cir. 1270), 28. 
Tasso (Goethe), 135, 139, 144, 148- 

150, 155. 
Taucher, Der (Schiller), 257. 
Tell, Wilhelm (Schiller), 276, 281- 

287. 

Theodoric of Verona (b. 454 d 

526), 3, 8, 12, 13, 14. 
Tieck, L. (b. 1773, d. 1853), 313- 

314. 

Titan (Richter), 299. 
Titurel, Epic, 24. 

Tristan u. Isolde (Gottfried), 18 

20-21, 27. 
Trompeterv, Sakkingen (Scheffel), 

Troy, Epic of, 3. 



Uhland, L. (b. 1787, d. 1862), 
321 . 

Ulfilas (fl. 340), 6. 
Ulrich, see Lichtenstein. 



Varnhagen v. Ense, 337 



Ve'decke, Heinrichof (fl. 1184), 18, 
Voltaire (b. 1694, d. 1778), 76 87 
VO 302 hUle d ' " E$thetik ( Ric ^er), 
Voss, J. H. (b. 1751, d. 1826), 46 
Voss, R. (b. 1851), 395, note. 
Vulpms, Christiane (Goethe), 151- 
153, 156, 157, 161, 174, 296. 



Wagner, R. (b. 1813, d. 1883), 12 
23, 28, 253. ' 

Wahlverwandschaften (Goethe) 

166-169, 366, 369. 
Wailenstein (Schiller), 238, 256- 

Walther v. d. Vogelweide (d. cir 

1230), 10, 11, 25-26, 32. 
Weber, F. W. (b. 1813), 391, note. 
\V est-Ostliche Divan, Der (Goethe) 
170-174. 

Wieland, O. M. (b. 1733. d. 1813) 
48-60, 38, 67, 78, 84, 112, 132 
133, 135, 237, 296, 307, 366. 
Wilbrandt, A. (b. 1837), 381, 389 
Wildenbruch, E. A. (b. 1845), 389, 
395. 

Wilhelm Meister (Goethe) 114 118 
135, 139, 142, 157, 160, ' 161-363' 
167, 169, 176, 253, 257, 314,366.' 
Wilhelm Tell, see Tell. 
Winckelmann, J. J, (b. 1717 d 

1768), 37, 93, 307. 
Willehalm (Wolfram), 23, 24. 
Willemer, Marianne, 170. 
Wolfdietrich, Epic, 15. 
Wolff, J. (b. 1834), 391, note. 
Wolfram v. Eschenbach (d. cir 
1220), 10, 11, 21-24. 30, 32, 366. 
Wnz, Leben d. Schulmeisters Maria 
(Richter), 292. 



Xenien (Goethe, Schiller), 160, 
254, 257. 



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